IntellIJ remote development with good old X11 forwarding

I played around with IntelliJs Remote Development functionality recently.

It works mostly, but there are a few bugs or inconsistencies between a local installation and the Remote Access that killed my productivity.

So I switched back to the good old X11 Forwarding🙂

The Setup was quite simple:

Enable X11 Forwarding on the Remote Host

...
X11Forwarding yes

Host my-remote-host
    HostName my-remote-host
    ForwardX11 yes
    ForwardX11Trusted yes

Now, I can simply launch my remote IDE as follows

ssh user@my-remote-host "intellij-idea-ultimate-edition ~/workspace/ &>/dev/null"

So far It seems much better than the built-in solution from IntelliJ - but let’s see how It plays out over a few weeks.

This obvisously only works for the (deprecated) X11 Window Server - For Wayland, Waypipe seems like a good option (haven't tried it out yet).