Changing the look & feel in NetBeans 6.8

Recently I’ve been trying to switch my work environment theme to something with lower contrast (namely the excellent Zenburn theme). Swing applications, however,have difficulties with GTK themes when they are using the GTK+ look & feel, so I’ve decided to go to Nimbus – the new default look & feel for Java apps since Java 6 Update 10.

The only problem with the plan was that there is no way to change the look and feel inside NetBeans – it had to be done by changing its configuration. This is done fairly easy. Just find the file /etc/netbeans.conf in NetBeans’s installation folder and append this to the netbeans_default_options section:

--laf Nimbus

Now you just have to (re)start NetBeans and you can enjoy Nimbus.