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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

I have a new project at work that I decided to use it for to see how I liked using VS Code.

For the most part, I like it, but it's lack of Mac-nativeness bugs me, and it may bug me enough to switch. Double clicking the window bar in all natives app minimizes them to the dock for me. In Visual Studio, it maximizes my window (but not into full screen mode). I keep clicking the menu bar to minimize a window, and this keeps happening. It's kind of maddening.

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There is a way to set VScode to use the native menu bar on macOS instead of the Electron'd frameless bar.

Enabling that system-wide made the experience so much more pleasant:

    "window.titleBarStyle": "native",

OMG this is so much better. I don't get why they would make "custom" the default setting. Thank you.

I never minimize anything on Mac, the concept is not so useful since there's nothing interesting on the "desktop" anyway.

I keep a lot of different overlapping windows open, and I sometimes minimize apps to find other stuff, not the desktop. For instance, I might be minimizing my text editor so that I can push a bunch of Git changes in Tower.

It looks pretty bad on Linux too. Somehow they managed to transport the crappy font rendering from Windows to Linux. It really feels like it's not built for Linux, but just shoe-horned in.

I'm using it on Windows and Linux, and found it pretty good. What's the issue with fonts?

Set up 11pt Consolas on a native Windows app and set up VSC side by side. It looks nothing alike.

It's a years old Chrome bug. Wish they had a Chakra version of Elektron.

I see.

I always use 15pt Fira Code

On Linux, it renders fonts the same way Chromium or Chrome do. If you're getting "crappy font rendering from Windows", you probably need to change your fonts.conf to change font hinting from full to slight (or none, if you like it more like Macs).

Edit: And also note that, for whatever reason, GNOME does its own thing where you also have to edit the GSettings in addition to the fonts.conf settings depending on what app you're running.

Font rendering is handled by Chromium's libraries/dependencies.

Do you also criticize Chromium's font rendering? Maybe you are just looking for things to complain about?

Chromium font rendering on Windows is terrible as it doesn't properly use the platform renderer and settings.

However on Linux it does, so this sounds like a broken fontconfig setup, or a toolkit not getting the right hinting config.

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