Hello,

I have an iMac 27" and I love the screen real-estate I get out of it (2560x1440). However, during programming I almost always use a single window and use the “spaces” functionality in OS X to switch between my editor and the browser.

Doing this, I always found that my screen is too big or the resolution too high to have a nice development environment, but lowering the resolution results in a blurry screen so that wasn’t a solution.

Until today (well, just 10 minutes ago), when I found out how to enable HiDPI mode in OS X Lion. I now have a gorgeous screen with the right pixels (1280x720) for my programming needs.

The problem? It seems the text rendered in Sublime Text 2 gets extremely blurry as a result when I use antialiasing.

Here are two screenshots of the end result. As you can see, the text in the OS (and on websites and other apps) are very crisp and nice to look at, the text in the editor not so much.

Disabling “antialias” in the options somewhat solves the problem, but I’d rather have antialiasing enabled AND have crisp text. Is this at all possible with Sublime Text, or would it require a complete rewrite of the app?

*I had to scale down the images below due to their size, which makes the “Retina/HiDPI” effect less obvious. You can click here for the fullscreen images: one two
*

sublime-text-1-thumb.png1280×720 279 KB

sublime-text-2-thumb.png1280×720 234 KB

Anyone? Jon?

Would love to know if this can be fixed in the near future or if there’s a way to work around this issue?

HiDPI support won’t be added until there’s hardware that takes advantage of it

Ah okay, too bad. I like to use the HiDPI mode right now in Lion the way I described in the first post.

There is hardware that can take advantage of it. Here’s a comparison of what ST looks like on my HiDP display (the crisp font is iTerm):

https://img.skitch.com/20120406-pbtg5hmku8pdduuspky1p4ihd3.png

This forum is cropping the image, so you can see the full image at (https://img.skitch.com/20120406-pbtg5hmku8pdduuspky1p4ihd3.png)

I’m aware it can be enabled if you tweak the right settings in OS X, but that’s not the same thing as high resolution monitors being in common use. When apple announce the hardware, I’ll start working on it.

Just to save you some time: When you start implementing HiDPI support, the first step you’ll need to take is to add an NSPrincipalClass entry to your app’s Info.plist, otherwise HiDPI won’t be enabled for your application. I don’t think this is documented anywhere, and I’ve spent quite some time tracking it down when I started looking at the HiDPI implementation for an app I work on.

When I add that entry to Sublime Text 2’s Info.plist (and rename the app bundle to clear some caches), at least the title bar is HiDPI. The rest of the window is not, though.

I guess this post has become a lot more relevant since yesterday, yeey!

Looking forward to using a Retina Macbook Pro for my development work. But I’ll hold off on buying it for a few more weeks, let’s hope Jon gets around to adding support for it in the near future.

I got this problem exactly like the first post’s images, but I do not turned on the “HiDPI mode”,
I am using a Mac mini (OS X Lion) with a 23" LCD (1920 * 1080 resolution), its very horrifying looking at those font. I hope Jon can help with this issue. Really really thx.

I also use the HiDPI mode on an “unsupported system” - MacBook Air hooked up to an external Monitor in my office.
Therefore I second the an implementation of the HiDPI Fonts and Icons!

I can confirm that using the new retina MB Pro, Sublime Text 2 is less than desirable (when all the other text on the screen is crisp, the blurry text of sublime actually gives me a bit of a headache when trying to read it).

I’ll just add my confirmation – SublimeText 2 (along with a billion other apps, it seems) doesn’t render text correctly on the new Retina MBP.

Cheers,
Dave

+1: HiDPI support is definitely a very important feature - looks terrible on the new Retina MBP at the moment.

+1 retina user here

Sorry, but now that ChocolatApp has it, it’s probably something that others are looking for.

I’ve got a retina MacBook Pro on the way, so I’m definitely hoping something will be done. I imagine it might be difficult to update the theme(s) though, so I assume it’s going to take some time to decide how to handle it (e.g., scale up non-HDPI images, look for images of the same name with an @2x suffix, etc.).

Tested ST2 on a retina macbook and can confirm the text looks horrible. Looking forward to seeing this fixed (the text rendering fix should be a no-brainer at least :).

+1 - just cracked open a retina MBP and Sublime was one of the first programs to try and get running. Would love to see the retina support added for text. Can live with the icons.

Out of curiosity to those who’ve already got a retina MBP, how does it look if you switch the screen resolution over to scaled 1920x1200?

Font rendering looks pretty terrible on the Retina MBP. I can live with the theme images being a little under res for now (although resolution independent theming would be fantastic!). However, it really makes Sublime unusable as a text editor until the font rendering can appear unpixelated.