Question

What do I do if IntelliJ IDE is not responding to mouse clicks, the UI is frozen or blank?

Solutions to try

Kill the process (example for Windows).

If the IDE opens fine after that and lets you navigate around for a while, try these:

• Temporarily disable all of your custom plugins and restart the IDE: Preferences | Plugins | Installed | ⚙ | Disable all downloaded plugins
• Increase the heap size in Help | Change Memory Settings. You can increase it up to 85% of the overall available memory.
• Switch runtime JDK to default JetBrains Runtime in case something else is selected.

If the IDE hangs right after startup and you can't reach any menus, see if it helps to locate the IDE plugin directory in OS file explorer and delete it.

Default locations:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\JetBrains<product><version>\plugins Example: C:\Users\JohnS\AppData\Roaming\JetBrains\IntelliJIdea2024.1\plugins
• MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/<product><version>/plugins Example: ~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/WebStorm2024.1/plugins
• Linux: ~/.local/share/JetBrains/<product><version> Example: ~/.local/share/JetBrains/PhpStorm2024.1

⚠️ What to send to support in case nothing helps

• If you can access the UI, go to Help | Collect Logs and Diagnostic Data and send over the entire generated archive. It can already contain auto-generated thread dumps that we can analyze.
• If the IDE freezes right after launch and you can't click any menu, collect a few logs using jstack while the process is hanging.

Files can be attached to the support request or uploaded privately to our server. Make sure you provide the id of the upload so that we can find it.