Ugly fonts in IntelliJ IDEA on Arch Linux

Posted on Tue 11 October 2016 in tech

UPDATE

intellij-jdk is now marked orphaned in AUR. I therefore stopped using this package and switched to a manual install of IntelliJ IDEA. This way the bundled jdk by Jetbrains is used automatically.

Old Post

Java fonts on Linux have been ugly for a while. Especially in an IDE it's very annoying. It seems Jetbrains started to ship a patched JDK with IntelliJ 2016. Make sure to use this JDK on Arch to run IntelliJ!

Install

Install intellij-jdk from AUR.

Configuration

  • Start IntelliJ
  • CTRL+SHIFT+A to enter action
  • enter "switch JDK"
  • chose "Switch IDE boot JDK"
  • point IntelliJ to /opt/intellij-jdk and restart

Notes

I only use this JDK for running the IDE. For development I'm still using the opendjk packages provided by Arch. Besides installing this new JDK I also force my java application to use anti-aliasing. To do so add the following to /etc/environment:

_JAVA_OPTIONS='-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on'

intellij arch