How to change Swing application's look and feel at runtime?

Question

I know that there\'s a SwingUtilities.updateComponentTreeUI(Component c) method but it doesn\'t work perfectly. For example, I have a JFileChooser

Answer 1

Calling SwingUtilities.updateComponentTreeUI(mainWindow) will only update the Swing components in the Swing hierarchy under mainWindow.

If you store the JFileChooser somewhere in your code (e.g. in a field of a class) without showing the JFileChooser the chooser will not be updated by the SwingUtilities.updateComponentTreeUI(mainWindow) call. You can work around this by adding a listener to the UIManager yourself and call SwingUtilities.updateComponentTreeUI(myStoredFileChooser) from that listener when the look-and-feel is changed.

Make sure you do not create a memory leak with this, e.g. let that listener only have a WeakReference to the JFileChooser (as the lifetime of the UIManager equals the lifetime of the JVM)