Complete keyboard block in IntelliJ 13

Question

Sometimes when running IntelliJ it completely blocks all keyboard inputs in the program. E.g. I can click around a document with the mouse, I can even right click + paste. I cannot, however write anything through the keyboard or navigate with the arrows inside a document or between documents for that matter.

The only keyboard related actions that work seem to be system related; alt + tab, ctrl + alt + delete, caps lock etc. also when tabbing to another window the keyboard works fine, so it is not a hardware issue.

This seem to occur when a popup is active and I tab out of IntelliJ and back in, but I am not certain that this is the case.

I would like to stress that it is not merely the currently open document that I cannot modify, since I CAN insert text and remove it using mouse commands only (the file is not write protected or anything like that), it seem to be a complete block of all keyboard inputs in IntelliJ.

The only workaround I have found is to restart IntelliJ.

I am running Ubuntu 13.10. More or less all projects I work with in IntelliJ are maven projects. It happens roughly once a day when using IntelliJ as main IDE.

Answer 1

This seems to be an IBus issue. The bug is not localized yet but it's clear it is not in IDEA - rather in IBus or possibly in Java X events handling code.

Workarounds:

1. IBus can be disabled for IDEA by unsetting env. variable XMODIFIERS. So, add the following lines to $IDEA_HOME/bin/idea.sh at almost the end of the file:

 ...

XMODIFIERS=idea.sh
export XMODIFIERS

# ---------------------------------------------------------------------
# Run the IDE.
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------
...

2. Have been reported that run ibus-daemon -rd is not recommended as it may cause JVM crash. However, it also seems to work.

http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-78860

Answer 2

I ran into the same issue with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and IDEA 14+. I'm currently running IDEA 14.1.3.

The XMODIFIERS fix seemed to work for a while, but then the issue returned.

Changing Setup->Language->Keyboard input method system from iBus to none did not fix it for me.

What finally worked was switching JDKs from

java version "1.7.0_79"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea 2.5.5) (7u79-2.5.5-0ubuntu0.14.04.2)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.79-b02, mixed mode)

to

java version "1.7.0_75"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_75-b13)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.75-b04, mixed mode)

using

export IDEA_JDK=/home/don/apps/jdk1.7.0_75/