PhpStorm font rendering in Linux with TuxJDK

PhpStorm is a great IDE (albeit non-free software) but the default font rendering in Linux is atrocious.

A search for “phpstorm linux font rendering” will bring up a few different techniques, but here is what fixed font rendering for me on Fedora 20:

1. Install tuxjdk on your system.
2. Shutdown PhpStorm if already running.
3. Rename your existing PhpStorm directory to PhpStorm.bak. Download the PhpStorm .tar.gz file and unpack it in your home directory, renaming it to PhpStorm.
4. Download this patch, cd to the PhpStorm directory and run patch -p1 < phpstorm-tuxjdk.patch
5. Start up PhpStorm, revel in crisp font rendering

The contents of the patch are pretty straightforward: we are specifying a few font settings options, and making a change to run PhpStorm using TuxJDK instead of the standard java interpreter.

Enjoy beautiful fonts again! (I use M+ per this writer’s tip.)