ClearType in Remote Desktop with XP
A new feature in XP SP3 that should of particular interest to developers is ClearType over RDP (remote desktop protocol). If you occasionally use remote desktop to work from home, or work remotely to your development machine, please read on.
If you’re not familiar with ClearType, you can head over to Wikipedia for a full explanation. In a nutshell, it takes advantage of the fact that each pixel in an LCD screen actually has 3 sub-pixels. They can be “hacked” to improve the anti-aliasing of text displayed on the screen. I’ve been a huge fan of the feature, especially for source code, and I have a hard time living without it. In XP (locally), it’s turned off by default, but turned on in Vista.
I had always noticed the remote desktop would not give me ClearType. However, I became curious when I found the following options on my Vista machine. Apparently ClearType over RDP is now supported in the client, and is also supported when using Vista as the RDP server (no hacking needed).
Unfortunately, these options have no effect when using XP. If you want ClearType over RDP with XP SP3 (sorry, only SP3+), add the following registry key:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations] "AllowFontAntiAlias"=dword:00000001
After you add that registry key, simply reboot the server (XP), and reconnect. From what I can tell, the client options no longer matter. Even if I uncheck the “Font Smoothing” option, it still uses ClearType. It’s not a big deal, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
So far, after using this option for a while, I haven’t seen a significant performance impact over a VPN on the Internet.
If you want to take this a step further, install Consolas, it’s a font designed specifically for software development, and to take advantage of ClearType. It’s a free download from Microsoft.
Hamed said,
Wrote on December 24, 2008 @ 10:38 am
Hi
Would you please tell me how can I model agregation (or composition) , and various type of association (one-to-one , one-to-many and many-to many ) relationships between two classes in c# ?
Best Regards
Willie said,
Wrote on December 24, 2008 @ 11:52 am
Wow, holy crap. I just tried coding over a RD connection (new HDTV
and the first thing I noticed was the font was terrible. I clicked the font smoothing stuff, installed Consolas on the local machine and nothing changed. I’m betting that registry change and the fact that I probably need to update the XP machine to SP3+ is where I’m going wrong. Thanks for the pointer.
Willie said,
Wrote on December 29, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
Installed the font, set the registry key, and still got nothing. Darn!
Willie said,
Wrote on December 30, 2008 @ 9:04 pm
Well, somewhere in there it worked. Glad to have sharp text again. I’m guessing it was a reboot that did it although I shut off computer’s nightly so though I did do that. Maybe not
Thanks for the help.
Nate said,
Wrote on January 20, 2009 @ 6:49 pm
YOU ARE MY HERO!
However, I had to add RDP-Tcp onto that “path,” or whatever it’s called.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp]
“AllowFontAntiAlias”=dword:00000001
Dan Dar3 said,
Wrote on February 5, 2009 @ 11:10 am
Wow, Jason, you’re da man!
I’ve been looking for this for quite some time, I do my main development on a laptop connected through RDP to a XP desktop machine (XP SP3 to XP SP3), and man now I can use consolas!
Personally I don’t like ClearType enabled in XP although as I said using it on a laptop, I like the texts nice and crips the Standard font smoothing method does it just fine for me. But, with this change although I enable Standard mode, I can still get the most of Consolas without having to fully enable the ClearType for the entire system.
Thanks so much for sharing this with us!!!
sonika said,
Wrote on July 4, 2009 @ 1:22 am
hi,
could you please help me in creating java code on remote desktop control in xp 2003(i have just tried in implementing the code but i was not successfull.
Enrique said,
Wrote on March 7, 2010 @ 12:11 pm
Any luck getting this to work under Server 2003? I’d assume the same registry entry would work as they are basically the same OS (XP and 2003 that is).
Like you said, using visual studio from RDP without cleartype is an excersize in eye strain.
Bucky said,
Wrote on April 30, 2010 @ 12:23 pm
Awesome, thanks! It worked for me with XP sp3.
Actually, I don’t really care for cleartype in terms of anti-aliasing. But what I use cleartype for is to increase the thickness of the fonts.
Alex van Herwijnen said,
Wrote on May 13, 2010 @ 7:30 pm
Enrique: for Windows Server 2003, there’s a seperate hotfix available to enable ClearType over Terminal Services (which RDP is).
You can find it on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946633, use the ‘View and request hotfix’-link at the top to obtain it.
pdf23ds said,
Wrote on July 25, 2010 @ 9:01 pm
Adding the key in your post doesn’t work in all cicumstances. If the session is initiated remotely it actually uses a different registry setting.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp]
“AllowFontAntiAlias”=dword:00000001
Please amend your post–it would have saved me a few minutes.