Calligraphy of a plist

A while back Steve Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford University telling the students how he had become a multi-bazillionaire by dropping out of college. Just the sort of thing that you want to tell a crowd of parents that have been spending $30k a year for the past four years.

During the speech though he did talk about how he took a calligraphy course after he dropped out which gave him a love for all things fonts. It would be cool to say that what I’m about to show you is because I too love fonts, but I really just wanted our tools to match the look of the fonts in Xcode.

So by default, out of the box, TestTrack and Surround SCM kinda look like this:

Surround SCM before (click to enlarge):

TestTrack before (click to enlarge):

This is really perfectly fine, but if we want them to look a little more like Xcode we need to make them look like this:

Surround SCM after (click to enlarge):

TestTrack after (click to enlarge):

The magic to do this is to send me a million dollars and I’ll send you a special build. (Give me a break, I made the mistake of graduating from college which apparently torpedoes my chance of becoming a Jobs-like multi-bazillionaire. I’ve gotta make up it somehow.)

(Seriously though, sending me the money really will make this happen.)

Short of that, the way to change the font is to edit your ~/Library/Preferences/com.trolltech.plist file and add/change the Qt.font string key to this:

Lucida Grande,11,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0

Save and restart the TestTrack or Surround SCM clients and you should be good to go.