Turn Off Text Antialiasing in Xcode

I’m not sure in what way my brain is broken to cause this to bother me so much, but I’ve often found myself staring at Xcode after a long time, fixating on the antialiased text being hard to read. I’m pretty sure a retina display would solve the problem, but that isn’t an option for my iMac or MacBook Air. Instead, what you can do is pick a font which has bitmap versions included for small sizes1 and type this into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode NSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabled -bool YES
defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 24

Restart Xcode and the slightly fuzzy antialiased text will be replaced with slightly pixelated non-antialiased text.


  1. I like Anonymous Pro, which has bitmaps for up to 13pt. 
Collin Donnell @collin