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MacVim: Thicker font rendering compared to TextMate

This is bothering me for some time now. With same source file, same theme (almost) the thickness of text between MacVim and Textmate is different.

I have linked to the screenshot .. here. There are 3 editors in it. Leftmost is sublime v3, middle is MacVim and rightmost is TextMate. The objective is to compare the font thickness. MacVim & sublime text is much thicker whereas TextMate is slicker (and sophisticated .. personal choice :) ). All this is on Mac OS X Mavericks with retina display.

I hope u all see the differences in the screenshot.

Note: for MacVim, toggling the anti-alias option does make some difference but still nothing compared to TextMate.

Questions:

  • Is there any configuration in VIM (or Mac OS) which governs the font thickness? I am a primarily Vim user, so interested in solutions for VIM
  • (Out of curiosity) Why is the rendering different? I would assume that all the editors must be relying on underlying OS APIs
Solution

  • This has to do with subpixel antialiasing. Textmate disables this for themes with dark backgrounds: https://github.com/textmate/textmate/wiki/Hidden-Settings#controlling-font-smoothing

    for MacVim subpixel antialiasing can be disabled with the terminal command:

    defaults write org.vim.MacVim AppleFontSmoothing -int 0