Monaco 9 on Xcode 11

I am a long time Mac programmer. I started with the 68000 Macintosh Development System in 1984, and ever since, I used the Monaco 9 screen font for coding of everything in C, FORTRAN, Pascal, C++, Objective-C, HTML, JS, CSS, SVG, ... For me it was such an incredible disappointment that the real Monaco 9, i.e. the screen font, had gone with Xcode 9, that I kept Xcode 8 for the daily work. Finally, I needed to move ahead to macOS 10.14 Mojave, and Xcode 8 did not work anymore. That's the bad news. The good news is that the Monaco 9 screen font is back with Xcode 11.2 - Hurray!

This comes not toll free, a few adjustments in the Terminal need to be made:

1. Font smoothing needs to be disabled in the source editor:
   defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode SourceEditorDisableAntialiasing 1
2. Font substitution of TTF by screen fonts needs to be enabled, otherwise the distance between the characters would be too large:
   defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode NSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabled 1
3. Open the Fonts & Colors Theme file and adjust the line spacing from 1.5 to 0.81:
   nano ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/FontAndColorThemes/Xcode.xccolortheme

   ...
           <key>DVTLineSpacing</key>
           <real>0.81</real>
   ...

Now close and re-open Xcode and that's it.

What a great relieve. Finally, I am missing only SVN for being totally happy, but that is another story.

Copyright © Dr. Rolf Jansen - 2019-11-18 14:15:32

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