Holy moly, an often forgotten, simple, yet effective tip worth sharing:

I forgot how turning off font smoothing makes the world of difference on retina/high PPI screens. If using a non-apple external monitor, especially those with the less adopted formats, on a mac, font smoothing will make your fonts more bold or blurry, disabling is a must for programmers as it's probably making your code fonts less readable.

Since Big Sur, font smoothing can be adjusted in two ways.

Via the terminal

defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

• "0" disables font smoothing
• "1" enables light font smoothing
• "2" enables default medium smoothing
• "3" enables strong smoothing
• Thus, If you wish to revert to the default setting simply replace the "0" at the end of the command with a "2".

Via a helper app

Luckily, if you're not comfortable changing setting via the command line, someones kindly made a helper app (a little overkill but makes it super easy).

https://www.fontsmoothingadjuster.com

Learn more

Nikita Prokopov (the chap behind Fira Code) wrote a super in-depth post regarding font smoothing, displays, pixels and resolutions. Check it out for more context.

Have a good'un.

Sam.