is there a way to specify that when I open terminal from intellij (on an M1 mac), it opens in rosetta mode by default?

what do you mean by “rosetta mode”? Any given application is either a universal binary (works natively, rosetta not required) or x86_64 binary that requires rosetta to run.

can

arch -x86_64 zsh

be run automatically when I open a terminal in IntelliJ?

looks like there are some env vars set by IntelliJ, could drop all this in ~/.zshrc with appropriate conditionals.

➜  xxx git:(main) ✗ set | grep intellij
XPC_SERVICE_NAME=application.com.jetbrains.intellij.145165623.145169260
__CFBundleIdentifier=com.jetbrains.intellij
precmd_functions=( omz_termsupport_precmd _z_precmd _zsh_autosuggest_start __intellij_command_terminated )
preexec_functions=( omz_termsupport_preexec __intellij_cmd_preexec )

what in particular do you need to run in Rosetta? note that running Apple developer tools in Rosetta is not supported, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-notes/xcode-14_3-release-notes#Deprecations