I installed recently Cursor, and immediately noticed that the font rendering is worse than in VS Code.
It uses a forced grayscale on Windows, while ClearType (a.k.a subpixel antialiasing) is available and used in VSCode.
There are multiple reports of this issue, but it seems to be ignored.
You can see diff screnshots, VS Code is left, Cursor is right
Steps to Reproduce
Open Cursor and VS Code side to side
Look at the explorer panel font rendering at the left
Another place the issue is really visible is in context menus
Expected Behavior
Cursor should not force the grayscale antialiasing on users.
I tried enabling the setting, but nothing changed on my side.
I tried looking a little more in the text rendering of Cursor to give additional details, and noticed the subpixel antialiasing is in fact present, but not everywhere.
Places where the subpixel antialiasing works:
Text editor
Tabs
Terminal panel
Agent window (partial, seems to work only on user messages and chat input, but may due to different font weight)
Settings
Places where the subpixel antialiasing doesn’t work:
Every view in the activity bar (Explorer, Search, Source control, Debug, …)
Menus. This implies context menus as well as menus in the main bar (File, Edit, …)
Problems panel, but it seems to be also present in VS Code
I also noticed the colored text of the explorer view having a less saturated color, for the exact same theme. This issue seems to be present only in the explorer view, as other views having colored text with the same color don’t have this kind of desaturation
(VS Code on the left, Cursor on the right)
