Can you adjust text weight in TextMate?

Question

Please help me, because unless I'm losing my mind. My text in TextMate suddenly looks a lot lighter than it should.

Screenshot: http://cl.ly/5kVW

I fired up TextMate yesterday and I noticed that suddenly the text was a little hard to read. So I ran to TextMate preferences to see if I had accidentally un-bolded all text. But I can only find it on a per-theme-basis. Text looks light to me across all themes.

I even looked through the TextMate manual but I can't seem to find anything.

Am I losing my mind?

Found screenshot of what it should look like with this same theme: http://www.monokai.nl/blog/wp-content/asdev/monokaiTheme.gif

Answer 1

I've been seeing the same thing lately. I haven't been able to determine the cause or reliably reproduce the bug, but perhaps it is related to the most recent update (I'm using the "cutting-edge" build 1631). I believe I began seeing the issue after the update (mid-March).

Sometimes restarting TextMate has fixed it. Sometimes I cleared the font cache, too.

As Allan noted in the ticket I filed, this is due to a bug in OS 10.6 with third-party external LCD panels:

In that case the problem is likely with the automatic selection of font smoothing (based on display), see http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090828224632809 for more details and potential workaround.

The reason restarting TextMate sometimes worked for me (and you, apparently), is because we restarted it without the external monitor attached. Running the defaults command in that Mac OS X Hints article fixes it properly.

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2