freetype_load_flags = "DEFAULT"

{{since('20210314-114017-04b7cedd')}}

An advanced option to fine tune the freetype rasterizer. This is a bitfield, so you can combine one or more of these options together, separated by the | character, although not many of the available options necessarily make sense to be combined.

Available flags are:

• DEFAULT - This is the default!
• NO_HINTING - Disable hinting. The freetype documentation says that this generally generates ‘blurrier’ bitmap glyph when the glyph is rendered in any of the anti-aliased modes, but that was written for rasterizing direct to bitmaps. In the context of wezterm where we are rasterizing to a texture that is then sampled and applied to a framebuffer through vertices on the GPU, the hinting process can be counter-productive and result in unexpected visual artifacts.
• NO_BITMAP - don't load any pre-rendered bitmap strikes
• FORCE_AUTOHINT - Use the freetype auto-hinter rather than the font's native hinter.
• MONOCHROME - instructs renderer to use 1-bit monochrome rendering. This option doesn't impact the hinter.
• NO_AUTOHINT - don't use the freetype auto-hinter

-- You probably don't want to do this, but this demonstrates
-- that the flags can be combined
config.freetype_load_flags = 'NO_HINTING|MONOCHROME'

{{since('20240128-202157-1e552d76')}}

The default value has changed to NO_HINTING as that generally works more predictably and with fewer surprising artifacts.

In earlier versions, it is recommended that you configure this explicitly:

config.freetype_load_flags = 'NO_HINTING'

{{since('20240203-110809-5046fc22')}}

The default value depends on the effective dpi of the display. If the dpi is 100 or larger, the default value is NO_HINTING. Otherwise, the default value is DEFAULT.