git-gui fonts are aliased

[Victor Engmark]

Binary package hint: git-core

All the text in git-gui has been blocky for some time now. I have no idea how this happened. I'm using the identical .gitconfig on two other machines, and I've had no trouble there. git-gui doesn't report any errors to the shell when started as `git gui &`. Screenshot attached

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: git-gui 1:1.7.0.4-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-23.37-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-23-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Jul 1 22:37:03 2010
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=en_US.utf8
SourcePackage: git-core

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

This is because the default version of tk is 8.4, which does not support antialiased fonts. If you want, you can
  aptitude install tk8.5
  update-alternatives --config wish
and select wish8.5.

(8.5 is currently the default in Debian experimental <http://bugs.debian.org/515984>. Once that goes into unstable it will eventually make its way into Ubuntu.)

[Victor Engmark (victor-engmark)]

That's really odd, since I've got three machines with 10.04, and only one of them displays this issue. Also, tk8.5 is installed on the machine in question:

$ dpkg --get-selections | grep ^tk
tk install
tk8.4 install
tk8.5 install

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

It’s not enough for the tk8.5 package to just be installed. You have to the run the command I mentioned above (update-alternatives --config wish, and select wish8.5) in order to set it as the default instead of 8.4.

[Victor Engmark (victor-engmark)]

On my laptop, on which fonts are anti-aliased:
$ uname -a
Linux <removed> 2.6.32-23-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jun 11 07:54:58 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
$ dpkg --get-selections | grep ^tk
tk install
tk8.4 install
tk8.5 install
$ update-alternatives --config wish
There are 3 choices for the alternative wish (providing /usr/bin/wish).

  Selection Path Priority Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0 /usr/bin/wish-default 10000 auto mode
  1 /usr/bin/wish-default 10000 manual mode
  2 /usr/bin/wish8.4 841 manual mode
  3 /usr/bin/wish8.5 840 manual mode

On my desktop, on which fonts are aliased:
$ uname -a
Linux <removed> 2.6.32-23-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jun 11 07:54:58 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
$ dpkg --get-selections | grep ^tk
tk install
tk8.4 install
tk8.5 install
$ update-alternatives --config wish
There are 3 choices for the alternative wish (providing /usr/bin/wish).

  Selection Path Priority Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0 /usr/bin/wish-default 10000 auto mode
  1 /usr/bin/wish-default 10000 manual mode
  2 /usr/bin/wish8.4 841 manual mode
  3 /usr/bin/wish8.5 840 manual mode

These look identical to me, so I guess the issue is elsewhere...

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Tk 8.4 does not support antialiasing. The code simply does not exist. Maybe on your laptop, you manually modified the /usr/bin/wish-default symlink, or installed a backported version of tk, or modified /usr/lib/git-core/git-gui, or added a wish binary earlier in your $PATH, or any number of other unsupported things that would have caused Tk 8.5 to be used instead. (If you want to figure out why, try running commands like ‘which wish’, ‘readlink -f /usr/bin/wish’, and ‘strace -f -e execve git gui’.)

Have you tried configuring it with update-alternatives, or not? Right now, this is the _only_ supported way to make git-gui use antialiased fonts, and that will not change until the default version of Tk is bumped to 8.5 in Ubuntu.

[Victor Engmark (victor-engmark)]

I'm sorry for confusing the issue. Looking closer at Git-Gui on the other machines, it appears that aliasing is not the issue - They are all aliased, but it looks much worse on one machine than on the others. I guess it could have something to do with the default font or font size; please see the attached screenshot.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Yes, bitmap fonts look terrible (especially when scaled), which is why the world has moved on to antialiased fonts. You can try changing the default font in Edit → Options after opening a repository, or you can enable antialiasing by switching to Tk 8.5 with the commands I gave you in comment 2.

I’m afraid there is nothing else that can be done about this until Tk 8.5 becomes the default version of Tk, so I’m closing this report. Don’t hesitate to report any other bugs you find.