With that background, herewith is a complete list of the ways in which you can change and finetune the appearance of NetBeans.
#Netbeans themes how to#
Starting from the screenshot below, which is the default appearance (for me, in my environment) of the latest release of the IDE-NetBeans IDE 8.1 Beta-I will move through a range of other screenshots and explain how to get there yourself.Īgain, note that these are all screenshots from NetBeans IDE on Windows, so your mileage may vary considerably, though at the very least this article should help to show you the diversity of appearances and styles available and maybe inspire you to think out of the box in relation to aspects of NetBeans that you might like to see differently. Interestingly, if you’re using the NetBeans Platform as the basis of your software, such as done at Boeing, NATO, and many many other organizations, and especially if you’re creating an editor of some kind, this article can also be of relevance to you, since the instructions, plugins, and themes described below should be applicable to any application created on top of the NetBeans Platform, of which NetBeans IDE itself is only one. It speaks to the popularity of NetBeans that so many different plugins and themes exist, since many, even most, of them have been created by NetBeans users around the world and have been contributed, in most cases for free, for anyone in the world to use. Not only can the editor and its fonts be customized, separately for each language it supports or globally-you can also completely change its entire “look and feel”, by trying out and than selecting one of many different “look and feel” plugins that are available. For these reasons, it’s probably a more realistic desire to want to have a tool that has a lot of ways to let you configure its interface, than to want to have a tool that comes with a 100% perfectly preconfigured appearance with which everyone is going to be equally satisfied, since that would be impossible to achieve.įortunately, NetBeans is extremely configurable. Not only do operating systems render user interfaces in different ways, not only are there variations resulting from video cards and other hardware components-there’s also the simple question of differences in taste. The idea that there’s ever going to be an out-of-the-box appearance, for any tool, that will please absolutely everyone in the world who uses it is a fallacy.