Disable Anti-Aliasing Fonts in Xcode 4.4 in Mountain Lion

Question

It's getting pretty frustrating to keep struggling with this one. I'm not sure if it's Xcode 4.4 or Mountain Lion (I installed both simultaneously), but once again my code is being anti-aliased (font smoothing) in Xcode.

I was previously able to fix this issue with the following instructions, taken from this question, but neither seem to work now:

For XCode 3.x I would do the following: defaults write com.apple.xcode AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 24.

For XCode 4 the domain of the user defaults change to com.apple.dt.Xcode. For XCode 4 defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 24 should get you what you want.

How do I get Xcode back to a useable state?

Answer 1

From the Release Notes: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/DeveloperTools/RN-Xcode/Chapters/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001051-CH1-SW680

Text and font rendering on OS X v10.8 is optimized for Retina display. On a non–Retina display running OS X v.10.8, some font configurations can appear blurry in Xcode. 11486875 Switch back to non–Retina display optimized text and font appearance in Xcode by enterin this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode NSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabled -bool YES

It worked for me on Mac Pro running Xcode 4.4 on Mountain Lion.

Answer 2

I also had this problem when upgrading to ML. System Preferences > General > Untick 'Use LCD font smoothing when available' seemed to fix it for me.

Answer 3

lifjoy's answer didn't work for OS X 10.8.2 and XCode 4.5, so I have found another solution:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 0