I have just started using IntelliJ IDEA 12.0 Community Edition on Mac OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion, and recently created a Java project. During a recent file system clean-up, I moved my project folder to a different folder and deleted the link to the old location under the “Recent Projects” list on the welcome screen.
However, now I can’t open my IntelliJ IDEA project at all. Browsing the file system, there does not appear to be a project file that I can select in the “Open Project” browser, nor can I double-click the project folder in Finder to open in IntelliJ IDEA. There is a hidden .idea folder inside the project, but it doesn’t show in the “Open Project” browser, and Finder doesn’t seem able to do anything about it.
If I double-click on my project folder from the IntelliJ IDEA “Open Project” browser, the “Open Project” browser disappears and nothing happens. No error message appears.
The problem turned out to be that I had two folders with the same name but different casing in the path to my project. For example:
Because of the casing, the file system and user (me) know that the
gitandGitfolders are distinct entities (admittedly, I should have used better names, but I was in the middle of a file system clean-up). IntelliJ IDEA 12.0 CE’s project opening algorithms appear to be case insensitive, so when I double-clicked on/Volumes/USB HDD/git/mygitproject/MyIntelliJIDEAProject, IntelliJ IDEA failed to find a folder namedmygitprojectunder/Volumes/USB HDD/Git, and the project failed to load.I renamed
/Volumes/USB HDD/Gitto/Volumes/USB HDD/Git.admin, and I can now open my IntelliJ IDEA project by double-clicking the project folder from the “Open Project” browser window under/Volumes/USB HDD/git/mygitproject/MyIntelliJIDEAProject.This is probably a minor bug in IntelliJ IDEA. I would have expected it to display an error message when it can’t find the project folder.