Starting in OS X El Capitan 10.11, Terminal's font smoothing is reduced for light-on-dark text, so that the overall weight is closer to the weight of dark-on-light text, improving readability by opening up counters (the open spaces inside glyphs like “e”), for example. You should find that it matches Safari's text rendering for light-on-dark text. It addresses the issue referred to in the question you linked: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/127351/is-there-a-way-to-make-the-terminals-font-less-blurry This new behavior is automatic and doesn't read the AppleFontSmoothing preference. If this is important to you, I recommend filing a [bug report][1] asking for either Terminal's new behavior to honor the AppleFontSmoothing preference or to add a Terminal-specific preference to control font smoothing. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/