Hacker News Reader

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.

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.