Most obviously, IntelliJ lets you change Swing the...

# compose-desktop

[mikehearn]

Most obviously, IntelliJ lets you change Swing themes. There seems no way to implement a similar feature for Compose (Desktop).

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

It lets you change themes within a tightly controlled environment of core and IntelliJ-specific custom components. You wouldn’t be able to extract those themes and have them seamlessly apply to third-party Swing components without major changes to those components. And that’s just for one look-and-feel.

Material as a reference implementation of a tightly controlled set of components provides exactly that - changing themes within that controlled environment.

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Note how IntelliJ doesn’t let you install other look-and-feels, or even switch to one of the core look-and-feels shipped by default with the JDK such as Metal or Nimbus.

[mikehearn]

That's true. But in the past IntelliJ has used different themes. When they changed, they didn't have to rewrite all their UI code, nor did plugin developers. So it had value.

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Yes, and there’s still support for theming IntelliJ - within the very particular confines on what constitutes a theme. And you can’t apply an IntelliJ theme on a random Swing app with its own custom components.

And what you are referring to is already supported by Material module and its components - using different colors, different typography, different shapes - and have it apply on the entirety of the app, as long as it’s using the Material components.

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Netbeans goes a bit further and allows switching look-and-feels for the whole app. It’s not “free” if you will, and there are look-and-feel specific augmentations in the codebase over here.