An easily reproducible issue I’ve recently been running into is JetBrains IDEs not being displayed properly in bspwm[0] environment. Instead of IDE graphical interface, only a gray solid window is being shown.

There’s nothing innovatory about this fix, however it seems like it has never been mentioned in this particular context, meaning running IntelliJ on bspwm and xorg.

This issue has been described in Troubleshooting section of Java article on ArchLinux wiki[1], although it doesn’t mention the fix method for bspwm.

What needs to be done is to export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1. Just like in the solution for Sway desktop environment.

The easiest way to achieve this in xorg environment is to add this line in ~/.xinitrc:

export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1

# Links

[0]: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Java#Gray_window,_applications_not_resizing_with_WM,_menus_immediately_closing