How can I get a Look & Feel like Intellij Idea in a Swing application?

Question

As a popular IDE for Java application, Intellij IDEA's look and feel is very beautiful in my opinion.

How did it do that? And how can I get a look and feel like Intellij IDEA in my Swing app?

Sunflower

IDEA allows for custom Look and Feel. Is this the default one you like? – Hampton

Answer 1

Current IntelliJ IDEA versions come with 3 themes bundled:

• IntelliJ (default light theme)
• Darcula (dark theme)
• High Contrast (accessibility theme)

Darcula theme is available as a stand alone open source project and can be reused in your own apps.

---

Original answer from 2011:

By default IDEA uses Alloy Look&Feel. It's a commercial L&F and it's already quite old and with no updates. One of the major issues with it is that it doesn't support anti-aliasing on most of the platforms.

Therefore, for Windows I'd recommend using Windows L&F. For Mac IDEA already uses Mac specific L&F. Alloy may be worth it only on Linux where most of the other L&Fs look very ugly, though GTK might be a better choice.

Taro

Actually, Alloy isn't a good choice under Linux either. It looks really ugly without anti-aliasing. I wonder that it is still the default theme in IDEA. Fortunately, one can easily change it in the settings. – Soothe

This answer is quite old. I doubt if IntelliJ is even using Alloy anymore. Is there an update for the answer to this question? – Fine

Answer 2

As far as the Darcula theme goes,

"I'm working on making Darcula a stand alone LaF. The work is almost done and I'm ready to release Darcula v 1.0 alpha or something. This means that you will be able to run you apps like this:

$ java -cp "darcula.jar:myapplication.jar" -Dswing.laf=Darcula MainClass  

And everything should work
I'll do an announce when Darcula is ready for publishing"

Konstantin Bulenkov - June 12, 2013

https://plus.google.com/+jetbrains/posts/NNCSHsjGNXD

I couldn't find any recent follow up info though.

Deafen

He seems to have put up a github project here: github.com/bulenkov/Darcula – Devilry

Answer 3

Don't know exact look and feel as intellij cause never used it[I'm a Eclipse user]. but following are different options for look and feel:

• Quaqua
• JGoodies
• Liquid
• Napkin
• Squareness
• Geek Farm
• InfoNode
• Others

Roofer

The link for "MLF" points to a project called "Mail Log Filter". Does not seem to be a Java look & feel. – Scathing

@a_horse_with_no_name: Added it in hurry. Thnx for pointing it out. Removed it. – Roofer

Answer 4

Many thanks to CrazyCoder, Harry Joy.

By default Intellij IDEA uses Alloy Look&Feel. It's a commercial L&F and it's already quite old and with no updates. One of the major issues with it is that it doesn't support anti-aliasing on most of the platforms.

In order to maintain consistency in different OS (like Mac OS X, Win, Linux), Alloy Look&Feel may be a good choice. However, I'd use open source L&F like JGoodies.

Sunflower