IntelliJ crashes when creating a new keymap

A very bizarre issue just started happening recently (Jan 2025). Anytime I tried to edit my keymap in IntelliJ, the entire application would crash.

The fix ended up being:

  1. Open Help > Edit Custom VM Options..
  2. Add this line: -Dsun.awt.mac.a11y.enabled=false
  3. Restart IDE (File > Invalidate Caches > Just Restart)

Interestingly enough, I passed the crash log to Claude and asked what might be happening, and Claude mentioned that some interaction with the Accessibility system was likely the culprit!

I don't know what the root cause was, but sure enough the a11y keyword confirms that it was some strange interaction with the MacOS accessibility system.

Of course, I didn't come up with this solution out of thin air. I dug it out of this YouTrack bug report

EDIT: This is the root issue for IntelliJ: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-7659/macOS-SIGILL-at-CoreFoundation0x1d47c5-CFRunLoopRunSpecific.cold.10xe