Letters always look "fat" in xterm.js? Its like there is always too much anti-aliasing or blurring.. is there a way to tweak these settings?

[detroittommy879]

No matter what I do, even choosing fonts with weight 100, I almost get it to look as thin as I want, but then the blurring makes it look messy.. I have not figured out exactly how to adjust these things, is there a way? Sometimes even when font weight is set to 100 it still looks as if its bold, 600.

I really like the way letters look in Wezterm, very clear, hopefully there is a way to control it in xterm.js?

First pic is when I set weight to 100 (with a font that supports it) it almost starts to look normal but the blurring kicks in.. the 2nd pic - letters still look 'fat'. This somewhat goes away when the theme is more of a light mode (dark text on bright background).

[cookesan]

xterm.js doesn't expose a separate "font smoothing" or anti-aliasing knob. The relevant terminal options are fontFamily, fontSize, fontWeight, fontWeightBold, letterSpacing, and lineHeight. With the WebGL renderer, the canvas is requested with antialias: false, and glyphs are drawn into a texture atlas at the browser/device pixel ratio. With the DOM renderer, the weights are applied through normal CSS font-weight.

So if fontWeight: 100 still looks heavy, the remaining variables are usually browser/OS font rasterization, the actual font file/variable-font axis support, device pixel ratio/scaling, and renderer choice. A few practical things to try:

• set both fontWeight and fontWeightBold explicitly, so ANSI bold text is not using the default bold weight
• use a font that has real thin/extra-light faces installed, not only a CSS-requested weight
• compare DOM vs WebGL renderer in the same browser
• check the page/OS scaling; fractional scaling can make canvas text look softer
• on dark themes, try a slightly lower foreground contrast or a different font, since bright-on-dark antialiasing often reads heavier than dark-on-light

I don't think there is an xterm.js option equivalent to "disable font smoothing" today.