Why doesn't the terminal hotkey (Alt+F12) ever work for me?

Most likely, Alt+F12 is already taken by some other application, a driver or OS function.

You can either change the shortcut in IntelliJ IDEA Keymap settings to something available or find the app which has taken it and reconfigure this app to not use this specific shortcut.

Thank you. I've rebound it to Alt+0 and it works fine now.

For me it was Nvidia's GeForce Experience app. After I disabled in-game overlay feature, all came back to normal.

Eugene.. thanks good call, same here it was Nvidia overlay stealing my alt+F12

Thanks, Eugene, that solved my problem also! Alt-F12 was being used to toggle the FPS indicator in GeForce Experience. I removed it and it's working as expected in PhpStorm.

For anybody else wondering how to change this:

• Open GeForce Experience
• Click the setting cog in the top right (just to the left of your account name)
• In the "In-Game Overlay" settings panel, click "Settings"
• Click "Keyboard Shortcuts"
• Under the "General" heading, there is a "Toggle FPS counter on/off" keyboard shortcut which you can change/remove as required.

Alternatively, as above, you can change the terminal keyboard shortcut.

For me, Intel Graphics Settings.

Thanks Eugene! 4 years later still helps!