Text rendering is thicker, less crisp than Terminal.app on retina and non-retina displays

iTerm 2 appears to render antialiased text with more weight and blurriness than Terminal.app

Tested with fonts: Monaco, Menlo, Source Code Pro

iTerm 2 version 2.1.1

Mac OS X 10.11 Beta (15A235d)

Difference can be seen in the following tweets:

Retina display https://twitter.com/TwoLivesLeft/status/626578929285906432 (iTerm on top)

Non-retina display https://twitter.com/TwoLivesLeft/status/626570412596461572 (iTerm on right)

com.googlecode.iterm2.plist

Title changed from iTerm 2 text rendering is thicker, less crisp than Terminal.app on retina and non-retina displays to Text rendering is thicker, less crisp than Terminal.app on retina and non-retina displays

Milestone changed to Ship 3.0

This is a really minor-sounding issue, but it's a continual annoyance for me. It's the biggest reason I still use Terminal.app most of the time — iTerm 2 makes me feel like my contacts are the wrong prescription.

iTerm 2 ↓

Terminal.app ↑

Pretty sure this is a dup of #3794 (closed). You should be able to fix it by doing:

defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 AppleFontSmoothing -integer 0

Status changed to closed

This is extremely close to correct, but it looks like subpixel antialiasing is turned off as well with that setting. This makes the text appear slightly grainy.

Here are super zoomed examples.

Terminal.app:

iTerm 2 default (too thick):

iTerm 2 with AppleFontSmoothing -integer 0 (too pixelated):

Is there a way to leave subpixel antialiasing on with the lighter weight?

Dup of #3874 (closed), hopefully fixed in tomorrow's nightly build.

Mentioned in issue #5166 (closed)