I decided to give IntelliJ IDEA a try for a new Android project in my also newly configured window manager… And after the splash screen I could only see a transparent frame.

After a bit of research it turns out that some Java apps don’t get along well with some non-reparenting window managers like bspwm because they are not acknowledged as such… It can be fixed by setting the window manager name property to one that is known by the JVM, by using wmname like follows:

$ wmname LG3D

After this change IDEA works flawlessly! Well, except maybe for the font anti-aliasing, but that’s another story…

Source and more info

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