Laggy scrolling on MacOS

Problem

In certain macOS configurations, scrolling might stutter and not look smooth and responsive enough.

Cause

There are the following known reasons for this:

1. Editor scrolling performance downgrade with whitespaces enabled (Poor performance when “Show whitespaces (Inner)” is enabled).
2. The limitation of the Metal rendering pipeline used in our products (Scrolling performance with metal renderer and related). The issue is mostly observed in the following cases:

• external displays with high refresh rate (144 Hz);
• built-in displays in Apple devices with ProMotion enabled.
• screen is shared by Google Meet, Zoom or etc. (Scroll and animations flicker / laggy UI and input when using Google Meet screen sharing) The IDE does not scroll with the display refresh rate, and looks like it's only capable to refresh at 40-60 FPS. This is more likely to happen with multiple IDE windows opened at once.

3. Displays have separate spaces option turned off in macOS Settings | Desktop and Dock | Mission Control.

Possible solutions

1.Turn off the Show whitespaces option if you have it enabled in File | Settings | Editor | General | Appearance. 2a. Disable ProMotion for the display. 2b. Disable Metal renderer and switch to the OpenGL instead: add -Dsun.java2d.metal=false to the main menu Help | Edit custom VM options and restart the IDE. 2c. To solve the lags in Zoom, GMeet, etc., share the entire screen instead of IDE window. 3. Turn on Displays have separate spaces in macOS settings.

Note: If you observe slow scrolling on MacOS, but the hints above do not help, kindly check this article and file a new issue to our tracker with the diagnostic info attached.