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Comment by cosmotic | Hacker News Reader

Java desktop was only ugly if you chose for it to be. It was pretty minimal effort to get native look and feel. Nothing built in electron looks native. If we're accepting custom interface using electron, that was doable with Java too.

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JetBrains IDEs arguably look/behave better than VSCode as far as a native app goes. I wouldn't say either look great on MacOS but a truly "native feeling" Mac app is usually quite different than a Linux/Windows equivalent.

Long time ago, Apple had a proper OS X Swing L&F, when you could do Cocoa in Java, and there was still some uncertainty if Objective-C would be embraced by Mac OS development community.

That look and feel still exists last time I checked. There is also a similar one on windows.

I much prefer vscode to intellij

I love JetBrains IDEs and have been using them for a decade, but I’d say their general behaviour as user interface is among their worst qualities. Chief of which being how any sort of dialogue or additional window is fully modal. Opening any of the settings windows for example completely locks you out of interacting with the main window.

I find them janky as hell, but their ability to wrangle code is top class.

Why is it no one ever seems to do it then? I have never seen a Java app look or act native on Windows.

Eclipse

I haven't used Eclipse in a decade, so maybe it's changed, but back then it was very much a Java UI, not a native feeling one.

I remember the Java UI, but at some point they switched to a version of Swing that made it look more native, at least on Linux.

Eclipse uses SWT which uses real native controls.

Of course Linux doesn't have native controls - I think it uses GTK on Linux.

It used SWT, which was a thin wrapper over native controls.

Ahh yes that's right.

Eclipsed used SWT which produced actual native controls. Swing controls are not native but look and feel native.

A Swing application looks ugly and not native by default, but the platform allows to plug a different look'n'feel. With small effort, you can make it look nice with something like flatlaf [1]. Pretty sure there are others, I haven't done Swing UI in a while.

[1] https://www.formdev.com/flatlaf/

It takes one line of code to get native look and feel in swing. Not sure why so many didn't do it.

They had native looking skins for Swing that still felt slightly off and behaved differently. Netbeans IDE looked nice, but it was weird in subtle ways.

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