LookAndFeel in ALL apps

To set your favorite LAF in all Java apps, you can create a file swing.properties in your jre/lib¹Windows: C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0_01\lib
Linux: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib folder with following contents:

swing.laf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel
swing.defaultlaf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel

You can also set the _JAVA_OPTIONS environment variable to the following (or just specify these parameters upon the java-call):

-Dswing.laf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel -Dswing.defaultlaf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel

From now on you will see NimbusLookAndFeel in all Java applications which do not set a LAF on their own.

Available LookAndFeels as of 1.6:

• com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel
• com.sun.java.swing.plaf.motif.MotifLookAndFeel
• com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel
• com.sun.java.swing.plaf.windows.WindowsLookAndFeel
• javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicLookAndFeel
• javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel
• javax.swing.plaf.multi.MultiLookAndFeel
• javax.swing.plaf.synth.SynthLookAndFeel

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  Windows: C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0_01\lib
  Linux: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib