Note: Crisp fonts on Alacritty

February 27, 2023
mac alacritty

screenshot of my Alacritty setup on the Mac

I’m using Alacritty on the Mac and I noticed how the font rendering is much thicker than I’m used to on iTerm. On iTerm I use the “thin strokes” setting, which is not available in Alacritty.

Turns out, you can set it with:

defaults write org.alacritty AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

If you then log in and logout again, your Alacritty will be similar to the crispness you find in iTerm.

If you want to restore it back to the default, do:

defaults delete org.alacritty AppleFontSmoothing

And if you like to have this kind of crispness across the entire OS. Do:

defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0
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