Back in 2003/4, I wrote the tab control for the NetBeans 3.6 window system, which is still in use - the thing JTabbedPane should have been if it had been written with the needs of applications like NetBeans in mind (i.e. model driven, not using the AWT hierarchy as its model, capable of complex transforms on its contents with minimal redraws, etc.).
Some time after that, NetBeans' Visual Library came into being, which makes easy a lot of things that are otherwise very hard in Swing - animation, glows around components that extend beyond the bounds of the component, smooth scrolling and more. So I've had it in my head for years that someone ought to write a replacement UI delegate for the editor tabs which uses it. Needing to take a break from another project, the other day I finally wrote that. It should work on any Swing look and feel (and I tested it on a bunch) - it derives its colors from those of the look and feel. And all of the gradient painting logic is carefully memory managed using cached BufferedImages (10-40x faster than caching GradientPaint in my tests and far more consistent in its performance). What it does differently are mainly animation and bling, and highlighting for the selected tab that sits outside the tab. It does have really lovely built-in tab-dragging support, but since drag support in the window system is implemented via an AWTEventListener in core.windows...I can disable that with a not-too-evil hack (have the UI delegate implement Tabbed.Adapter and then return null for its Tabbed instance), but then model changes aren't known to the window system, so it "corrects" them, undoing the drag on the next move. But the existing tab dragging support (with its ugly polygons) works fine, so that's disabled by default. So, two things: 1. If you'd like a little more (gratuitous?) bling in your editor tabs, please test it (download link below) 2. I'd be happy to contribute it to NetBeans if there's interest - it's already licensed compatibly Screen shot (running on my own Dark Look and Feel plugin): https://timboudreau.com/files/screen/04-10-2019_15-48-36.png Binary download compatible w/ JDK 8 and up, NetBeans 8.2 and up: https://timboudreau.com/files/visual-library-tabbedcontrol-0.3.1.nbm Github repo w/ source code: https://github.com/timboudreau/visual-library-tabcontrol Feedback appreciated. Thanks, Tim -- http://timboudreau.com
