Metal (Java Look and Feel)

メタル（Java ルック＆フィール） / 1998– / Style / Platform Screen Languages

Sun's default look and feel for Swing, built so that a program looks the same on every operating system. Metal was Sun's internal project name for it and stuck as the public one. Blue violet fills, thin straight borders, and a flat refusal to imitate the host platform are its signature.

Metal (Java Look and Feel) — DavidL, Metal look and feel in Swing, 2020 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
DavidL, Metal look and feel in Swing, 2020 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Metal (Java Look and Feel) — Apache Software Foundation, Apache JMeter 2.3.3 screen, 2009 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
Apache Software Foundation, Apache JMeter 2.3.3 screen, 2009 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 · CC BY-SA 3.0
Metal (Java Look and Feel) — Kateregga1, JOSM preferences screen, 2018 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
Kateregga1, JOSM preferences screen, 2018 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0

At a glance

Visual cues

  • Internal window title bars laid as a deep blue violet band over a pale blue violet field
  • A fine texture of dots and diagonal ticks stamped into title bars and dividers
  • Rectangular buttons with no corner radius, ringed by a one pixel deep blue violet line
  • The host system draws the outer window frame while everything inside it follows a different visual language

Best used for

  • Flattening the differences between operating systems so an internally distributed desktop tool reads as one picture everywhere
  • Recreating the screen of a turn of the century business application for a document or an exhibit

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Dictionary entry

Type
Run a single sans throughout and separate levels with weight and color only. Keep to two type sizes and leave headings undecorated.
Composition
Fix four bands inside the window: menu, tool strip, work area, status strip. Leave the host window frame alone and paint only what is inside it.
Material
Combine three steps of blue violet, a pale field, a deep band, a darker border, with three steps of gray. Draw every boundary as a one pixel line and never blur it.
Caution
Since Java SE 5 the default theme has been Ocean, which drains most of the blue violet away, so building on the assumption that Metal means blue violet will not match what actually runs.
Further study
the Metal and Ocean comparison figures in Oracle's Java tutorial / the difference in colour specification between DefaultMetalTheme and OceanTheme / the SwingSet2 demo screens and how each part is drawn

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https://indexstyle.org/styles/java-metal
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