Why does the "monospace" font look great in Terminal and gedit, and terrible in IntelliJ IDEA?

Question

Why does the "monospace" font look great in Terminal and gedit, and terrible in IntelliJ IDEA? IDEA uses Java's Swing library, and I understand it might be an issue with this. Is there a known fix?

Answer 1

I have the same problem. Apparently its a problem with the "hinting" level of the font, which IntelliJ forces to "full" no matter what the OS selects. This makes the fonts look jagged and thin rather than how its supposed to. There was a workaround I saw on a website, but it didn't work for me.

Answer 2

Generally, all Java software has poor font rendering under Linux. You’ll see this also under Windows, the fonts look different. It’s not a IntelliJ IDEA problem, but Java’s.

Answer 3

Hi I wrote a little manual howto fix this

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:no1wantdthisname/openjdk-fontfix
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

Script to start Intellij Idea

only note that need to change IDEA_HOME location for your path of idea

#!/bin/sh

IDEA_HOME=/opt/idea
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.7.0-openjdk-amd64
export _JAVA_OPTIONS="-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd \
                      -Dsun.java2d.xrender=true"
export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=this-is-deprecated
exec $IDEA_HOME/bin/idea.sh "$@" 

more info and screenshots of better fonts: http://urshulyak.com/?p=478