How to disable subpixel rendering in Jetbrains productsΒΆ

If you want to disable subpixel rendering (another term is font anitaliasing) in any JetBrains product (like: Idea, Pycharm and so on), you need to:

  1. Go to bin dir of install folder, find file that ends with *vmoptions (idea.vmoptions, pycharm.vmoptions).
  2. There should be a line -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd in this file, delete this line.
  3. Add line: -Dprism.lcdtext=false.

These two lines define properties passed to Java Virtual Machine that control antialiasing, both of them are undocumented, so they might not work in future JVM releases (I tested on 1.8.51). These JVM settings seem to clash with either JetBrains settings (that override these) and Gnome settings, so disabling them makes sense.