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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

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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.

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.