Set Look and Feel for a Swing application

The 'Look and Feel' is the term for the appearance of the graphical user interface of an application and it should be set prior to constructing and rendering any of the GUI. This example shows a couple of variants on how to set the look and feel for a Swing application.
The Java Development Kit contains a few look and feel classes (i.e. subclasses of the LookAndFeel class):

com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel
javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel
com.sun.java.swing.plaf.windows.WindowsLookAndFeel
com.sun.java.swing.plaf.motif.MotifLookAndFeel

You can set any of these by calling the setLookAndFeel() method of the UIManager:

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            UIManager.setLookAndFeel("com.sun.java.swing.plaf.motif.MotifLookAndFeel");
        } catch (Exception ex) {
            //Just print stacktrace here since it's an example.
            ex.printStackTrace();
        }
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                createTheGUIComponents();
            }
        });
    }

Now if you don't want the same look and feel for every platform but you want the application to adjust to the platform it is currently running on, you can specify that the look and feel for the current system should be used:

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());
        } catch (Exception ex) {
            //Just print stacktrace here since it's an example.
            ex.printStackTrace();
        }
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                createTheGUIComponents();
            }
        });
    }

Search for code examples on this site