Running IntelliJ 14 using Java 6 on Mac OS X Yosemite
Has anyone tried it? Does it work? I don't want to upgrade if it means I have to switch to Oracle's JDK because the font rendering is awful.
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I feel compelled to register and put up some warnings and hopefully Jetbrains can investigate this.
I have the latest Macbook pro with Retina display and a beefy nvidia card.
After installing Yosemite I tried to launch Intellij and the operating system asked me to download Apple JDK 1.6. So I did. Installed it and relaunched Intellij. Everything looks fine.
But really soon it is apparent that the performance is atrocious. Scrolling the project side bar lags. Typing lags. Everything just feels sluggish.
I even tried to change the JDK version in Info.plist to 1.7. It works, but antialiasing disappears and the fonts look terrible. It did get rid of the lag though.
So pick your poison after upgrading to Yosemite - horrible graphics performance or horrible font rendering?
Besides that, Chrome now feels noticably slower when opening tabs, switching tabs, etc.
Menus takes a second before appearing. Switching menus is slooow.
Don't upgrade.
I'm not seeing that _at all_. Be advised that after installing Yosemite your drive gets re-indexed by Spotlight. It's possible you're seeing that effect.
Can you check that you are running with Apple's SDK?
I am also driving 2 separate monitors. One of which is a high resolution 27" apple monitor.
When I disable the external monitors there is not noticable improvement in Intellij's responsiveness, but the overall UI of the operating systen feel a bit better.
I can't even use IntelliJ 13.1.5 - crashes every time I try to run it (https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-131485). So it seems there's definitely something wrong, though it is difficult to say if that's OS, JDK or IntelliJ issue. I'd say it is something wrong with OS 10.10 / Apple JDK 6 combo (OS 10.9 + Apple JDK 6 works fine), but Jetbrains gurus have to investigate what's going on.
You need to reinstall Apple JDK 6 when upgrading to 10.10.
http://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1572/en_US/JavaForOSX2014-001.dmg
Why do I need to install JDK 6?
Given that 8 is now available, why can't I just run IntelliJ on 7 or 8 and be done with it?
You can. But Java 7 and 8 have GUI and OS/X integration bugs that Java 6 doesn't. Oracle is aware of the issues but doesn't seem to actually care. I've had conversations with them and even Java 9 doesn't have a timeline for fixing the defects. Oracle's efforts seem to be focused on JavaFX and not Swing/AWT. If you want the best results, you need to run IntelliJ with Java 6 on OS/X. One specific bug alone makes me do that. Java 7, 8 (and probably 9) force the high-power GPU on when any graphics are used.
You may be able to have a try on jdk8u40.
Accoriding to the http://download.java.net/jdk8u40/changes/jdk8u40-b17.html?q=download/jdk8u40/changes/jdk8u40-b17.html , this issue seems to be fixed.