Yesterday my PHPStorm updated to the latest version 2026.1, and since then I had issues with it. It seemed to have a dark overlay or a shadow of a window over part of or the whole window (depending on whether the screen was maximized or not).

I could still work in PHPStorm, but it was really annoying and made my code very unreadable.

After posting on Mastodon and then searching around the Internet for a bit, I found out that this release is the first that turns on Wayland support by default. And this seems to be what is causing this problem. Luckily, Jetbrains already had a support issue with the information I needed!

Basically, when you have PHPStorm open, in the Help menu you click the option to Edit Custom VM Options. That opens a file in the editor. There, you simply add


-Dawt.toolkit.name=XToolkit


Save, restart PHPStorm, and the issue is gone.

Yes, this does mean you’re not on Wayland anymore. But hey, if that makes sure I can do my work, I’m happy.

Technical information: I run PHPStorm from WSL2 from an Ubuntu image. PHPStorm is not running on my Windows host, but inside the WSL2. This might have something to do with it. I have reports that this issue does not seem to happen on Linux Mint.