Changing size for JTabbedPane's Title

Question

I am creating my IDE using a JTabbedPane. As i add tabs to my JTabbedPane, some titles are longer and some are shorter. This results in quite an ugly title length with some really long titles.

An example where i add a Pane to my JTabbedPane:

codes.addTab("", icon, scroll.get(scroll.size() - 1));

This results in this output when i run the program:

enter image description here

As you can see, The longer titled tabs make the title tab quite long and ugly. And when i add too many tabs, this happens:

enter image description here

Question: Am i able to fix or scale the title size like maybe restrict the length of title is its too long? Also maybe a left right arrow on too many files? Just like this:

enter image description here

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:06

you can align your title to the left like this :

JLabel tabLabel = new JLabel("Tab", JLabel.LEFT);
//add new label at set location
jTabbedPane.setTabComponentAt(0, tabLabel);

If you want more information check this link the answer is very complet.

Hope i helps you

EDIT :You can also limit the lenght of your title it's an other possibility

You can also follow this tutorial made by Oracle it's pretty simple

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 16 '15 at 10:29

If you want to set the tab's size, it would be a little complicated because in some way you should override the default behavior of the JTabbedPane paint() method family and the LookAndFeel you use. I want to tell it is not that ugly you think, because manu IDEs such as Eclipse or Intellij also have different length tab sizes for the source files:

Eclipse:

enter image description here

So don't worry about size.

But about placement of the tabs, you must use the following method to change the tab placement's layout:

tabbedPane.setTabLayoutPolicy(JTabbedPane.SCROLL_TAB_LAYOUT);

You can add some SplitPanes to you newly hatched IDE to make it mode professional. Try the following snippet:

import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.Toolkit;

import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.JSplitPane;
import javax.swing.JTabbedPane;
import javax.swing.JTextArea;
import javax.swing.JToolBar;
import javax.swing.UIManager;

public class MainWindow extends JFrame {
    private static final int FRAME_WIDTH = 1024;
    private static final int FRAME_HEIGHT = 600;

    public MainWindow() {
        Dimension dim = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
        setBounds(dim.width/2-FRAME_WIDTH/2, dim.height/2-FRAME_HEIGHT/2, FRAME_WIDTH, FRAME_HEIGHT);
        setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        //
        this.setLayout(new BorderLayout(4, 4));
        //
        JToolBar toolBar = new JToolBar();
        toolBar.add(new JButton("Test"));
        toolBar.add(new JButton("Test"));
        toolBar.add(new JButton("Test"));
        toolBar.add(new JButton("Test"));
        JPanel northPanel = new JPanel();
        northPanel.add(toolBar);
        //
        JPanel southPanel = new JPanel();
        JLabel statusLabel = new JLabel("Test Status...");
        southPanel.add(statusLabel);
        //
        this.add(northPanel, BorderLayout.NORTH);
        this.add(southPanel, BorderLayout.SOUTH);
        //
        JPanel westPanel = new JPanel(new BorderLayout());
        JPanel eastPanel = new JPanel(new BorderLayout());
        JSplitPane splitPane = new JSplitPane(JSplitPane.HORIZONTAL_SPLIT);
        splitPane.setLeftComponent(eastPanel);
        splitPane.setRightComponent(westPanel);
        splitPane.setDividerLocation(250);
        splitPane.setContinuousLayout(true);
        this.add(splitPane, BorderLayout.CENTER);
        //
        JTabbedPane tabbedPane = new JTabbedPane();
        tabbedPane.addTab("MyNewIdeTabbedPaneTest.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("MyFrame.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("JButton.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("Main.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("MyNewIdeTabbedPaneTest.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("MyFrame.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("JButton.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("Main.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("MyNewIdeTabbedPaneTest.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("MyFrame.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("JButton.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.addTab("Main.java", new JTextArea());
        tabbedPane.setTabLayoutPolicy(JTabbedPane.SCROLL_TAB_LAYOUT);
        tabbedPane.setAutoscrolls(false);
        //tabbedPane.setTabLayoutPolicy(JTabbedPane.WRAP_TAB_LAYOUT); Also try this in comparison with above line
        westPanel.add(tabbedPane, BorderLayout.CENTER);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        MainWindow mw = new MainWindow();
        mw.setVisible(true);
    }
}

Good Luck.

Changing size for JTabbedPane's Title

2 Answers2