Toolbox App 3.4: Remote IDE Lifecycle Hooks, macOS Fullscreen Fix, UTF-8 Support, and More

Lana Novikova

Toolbox App 3.4 brings several long-awaited fixes alongside new capabilities for plugin developers. You can now hook into the remote IDE launch lifecycle, the Toolbox window behaves correctly in full-screen mode on macOS, and Windows users with non-ASCII usernames no longer need workarounds. The jetbrainsd service introduced in 3.3 also gets a round of reliability improvements.

Remote IDE lifecycle hooks

Toolbox App 3.4 introduces plugin API callbacks for the remote IDE launch lifecycle. If you’re building Toolbox plugins, you can now register hooks that fire when a remote IDE launch starts and when it completes.

What this enables:

• Pre-launch preparation: Plugins can run custom logic before the IDE process starts – installing plugins, configuring memory settings, or running scripts in the remote IDE directory.
• Post-launch callbacks: Plugins receive a notification when the IDE launch completes, enabling cleanup or follow-up actions.
• Asynchronous work: Callbacks support suspending operations, so the launch waits for the plugin’s work to finish before proceeding.

macOS full-screen fix

On MacBooks with a notch, the Toolbox window used to disappear when you moved the cursor away from the menu bar and back. This is now fixed – the window stays open reliably in full-screen mode.

UTF-8 and non-ASCII username support on Windows

Windows users with non-ASCII characters in their usernames (e.g., accented letters or Cyrillic characters) can now install and use the Toolbox App without issues.

Remote development fixes

• We resolved the file descriptor leak on Linux. The Toolbox App was leaking file descriptors to the ssh_outputs directory, accumulating thousands over time. In some cases, this caused the system tray icon to disappear after a few days.
• Connections no longer hang with a spinning indicator when connecting to a remote machine.
• TCP keepalive for OpenSSH connections has been enabled, improving stability for long-running remote sessions.

jetbrainsd service improvements

The jetbrainsd service introduced in 3.3 has received several reliability improvements in this release:

• The daemon now exits automatically after a timeout when all client applications (Toolbox or IDEs) have disconnected.
• Protocol handler registration no longer repeats on every startup.
• The jetbrains:// protocol links now work correctly on Linux systems without a full desktop environment, such as WSL. Previously, xdg-open would fail with a Permission denied error.

Other improvements

• IDEs now auto-restart correctly when updating to the latest version.

Let us know what you think of Toolbox App 3.4 – your feedback helps shape what comes next.

The JetBrains Toolbox App team