The Arduino IDE has had a bug which causes the entire screen to go blank and become unusable. The following issues are related to this problem. It does not appear to be closed, but the upstream bug may have been fixed indirectly.
But if this bug is not fix, you may need to recover from the blank screen. It appears it requires killing all Arduino processes since there are some background processes which support the app. You can start by getting the process id from Activity Monitor. Filter to "Arduino" and press cmd-i to get the info. Take id and run this command with it. It is in parenthese with Process Group.
ps -p <PID>This will confirm you have the right process. You can also see the process includes "Arduino IDE" in the path which all related processes do as well. You can use the full path to the app directory to filter all related processes. Use this command to see all of them. (Change the path if it is different)
ps aux | grep "/Applications/Arduino IDE.app/Contents" | grep -v grepSee all those supporting processes? Each one will need to be terminated. Finally, use xargs to kill each of these processes.
ps aux | grep "/Applications/Arduino IDE.app/Contents" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'Now you can restart the Arduino IDE and hopefully use it normally again.
Alternatively, you may find that there are bugs which persist with this tool. You can use VS Code with PlatformIO to work with Arduino, ESP32 and Raspberry Pi and other microcontrollers.