Controlling Color in Java Tabbed Pane

Question

I have been going nuts trying to figure this out.

I am trying to elimenate a light blue background that appears in a JTabbedPane. I\'ve tried everything and nothin

Answer 1

I used your example code, and what worked for me was moving the calls to UIManager.put() to a point where they would be executed before the JTabbedPane constructor was executed.

public class Main extends JFrame {
    JTabbedPane tab;

    public Main() {
       // ... other stuff
       UIManager.put("TabbedPane.contentAreaColor ",ColorUIResource.GREEN);
       UIManager.put("TabbedPane.selected",ColorUIResource.GREEN);
       UIManager.put("TabbedPane.background",ColorUIResource.GREEN);
       UIManager.put("TabbedPane.shadow",ColorUIResource.GREEN);

       // now construct the tabbed pane
       tab=new JTabbedPane();

       // ... other stuff
 }

There's also some other properties available (for the Metal L&F, at least):

UIManager.put("TabbedPane.borderColor", Color.RED);
UIManager.put("TabbedPane.darkShadow", ColorUIResource.RED);
UIManager.put("TabbedPane.light", ColorUIResource.RED);
UIManager.put("TabbedPane.highlight", ColorUIResource.RED);
UIManager.put("TabbedPane.focus", ColorUIResource.RED);
UIManager.put("TabbedPane.unselectedBackground", ColorUIResource.RED);
UIManager.put("TabbedPane.selectHighlight", ColorUIResource.RED);
UIManager.put("TabbedPane.tabAreaBackground", ColorUIResource.RED);
UIManager.put("TabbedPane.borderHightlightColor", ColorUIResource.RED);

These let you control most of the colours in the tab area.

I found with these settings there was still a very small blue-ish grey border around the content. I have searched for how to set this colour to no avail. The only solution I could find to get rid of this was:

UIManager.put("TabbedPane.contentBorderInsets", new Insets(0, 0, 0, 0));

Which is a sub-optimal solution.