How can I display 2 different panels at the same time?

Question

My first panel's layout is BorderLayout and my second panel's layout is GridBagLayout. I don't know how to show them both at the same time.

I already tried adding two panels to on another panel.

Answer 1

Adding both to another panel is the way to go! But you have to make the right choice of LayoutManager for this "parent" panel. Let me give you an example:

The JFrame 's content pane (where you add all your Component s to) can be setup with a LayoutManager of your choice. See this runnable example, which creates two JPanel s of 100x100 pixels in different colors. The panels are using the LayoutManager s you mentioned, but the main content pane of the JFrame is set to a BoxLayout (horizontal, but you can also set it to vertical!).

You can do this to any other panel, too. A panel.setLayout(new BoxLayout(panel, BoxLayout.X_AXIS)); is enough. The below example just uses the content pane, but you can adapt it to your needs:

import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.Color;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.GridBagLayout;

import javax.swing.BoxLayout;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JPanel;

public class TwoPanels extends JFrame {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
    private static final Dimension DEFAULT_DIMENSION = new Dimension(100, 100);

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new TwoPanels();
    }

    public TwoPanels() {
        //create panel 1
        JPanel panel1 = new JPanel(new BorderLayout());
        panel1.setPreferredSize(DEFAULT_DIMENSION);
        panel1.setBackground(Color.RED);

        //create panel 2
        JPanel panel2 = new JPanel(new GridBagLayout());
        panel2.setPreferredSize(DEFAULT_DIMENSION);
        panel2.setBackground(Color.GREEN);

        //set content pane layout
        setLayout(new BoxLayout(this.getContentPane(), BoxLayout.X_AXIS));

        //add to content pane
        add(panel1);
        add(panel2);

        //setup and display window
        pack();
        setVisible(true);
    }

}

It looks like this:

EDIT: It's a little unclear from your question that you actually want to stack overlaying panels . You might find what you need here: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/components/layeredpane.html