Changing Boot JDK

On OS X JetBrains bundled JDK gives superior text rendering quality to the Oracle JDK. Depending on the version you may or may not have the necessary javafx libraries.

You can get the JRE version from the product's about box:

Bundled JDK version 1.8.0u40b132 does not require changing the boot jdk and will support both Swing and JavaFX previews.

Bundled JDK version 1.8.0u40b119 and earlier does not have JavaFX jar files which will be downloaded and installed by the plugin. However, the JDK is missing some native media libraries needed by JavaFX which causes stability issues when trying to render images that require these libraries. If you are running with this JDK version you can create your own JDK which will be a copy of the bundled JDK with the missing native libraries added from Oracle JDK. See Creating a Bundled JDK With JavaFX for OS X

For earlier versions of JebBrain IDEs you can find the instructions in Selecting the JDK version the IDE will run under.

For later products, starting with build 141 (not sure about the exact build cutoff, could be earlier), you can add a boot jdk config file to the product's configuration directory with the full path of the location of the JDK you want the product to use:

Product	Boot JDK Config File
IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate & Community Edition	idea.jdk
PhpStorm	phpstorm.jdk
WebStorm	webstorm.jdk
PyCharm	pycharm.jdk
Other products probably follow a similar naming convention.	if you know another product's boot jdk config file then please add it to this list.

The list of directories used by the IDE is operating system dependent, see Directories used by the IDE to store settings, caches, plugins and logs – JetBrains Support