Font Smoothing Adjuster is a tiny, native macOS app that lets you adjust your font smoothing preferences in a graphical user interface. Issues and pull requests welcome!
Download the app at fontsmoothingadjuster.com.
Font smoothing is something that macOS does to make your fonts look slightly bolder. This has the side-effect of messing with carefully designed character shapes produced by font creators, and makes text more blurry. See the font smoothing section of Nikita Prokopov’s excellent article for more details.
On previous releases of macOS, you could disable font smoothing from the General pane of the System Preferences app, but this option has been removed from macOS Big Sur. This annoyed us, so we made a tiny app that lets you easily choose what level of font smoothing you would like, or disable it altogether.
Absolutely. If you’re comfortable using a terminal, you can also use the following commands to set your desired level of font smoothing instead of using the app. You will need to log off or restart your Mac for the changes to take effect.
defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0
defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 1
defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 3
defaults -currentHost delete -g AppleFontSmoothing
Make sure you have Xcode installed and set up on your machine.
git clone https://github.com/bouncetechnologies/Font-Smoothing-Adjuster.git
cd Font-Smoothing-Adjuster
open "Font Smoothing Adjuster.xcodeproj"
Update the settings in Signing & Capabilities for the Font Smoothing Adjuster target.
Make sure Signing Certificate is set to Development
Select Product -> Run from the menu, or press ⌘R
Please back up your current font smoothing preferences before running the tests.
Select Product -> Test from the menu, or press ⌘U