Welcome to the Tonic Look & Feel. This pluggable look and feel is a free substitute for the default native look and feel of Swing, ‘Metal’, distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Metal lacks both in usability and aesthetics. It contains considerable graphical noise, distracting the user from the key elements of the GUI.

Tonic, on the other hand, tries to provide a clean, balanced look and an improved feel. Tonic is available free of charge both for commercial and non-commercial applications. It lends a professional touch and a very tidy and clean interface to your Swing based applications.

Comparison between Tonic and Metal

This is an in-depth comparison of Metal vs. Tonic. We will look at the various aspects and elements of a Swing GUI, and how Tonic improves upon the Metal concept. Most of the Tonic features are documented with screenshots.

Screen shots

This page contains a set of full-resolution screen shots to give you a better idea of how Tonic looks like.

Live demo of Tonic

I have assembled a small demo application for Tonic. This application contains no functionality, but virtually all GUI elements of Swing. It can be run via WebStart. The demo is also available as source code, so that you can learn how Tonic can be used in your applications.

Download and Documentation

To download Tonic and get started with it, please click here. You can use Tonic free of charge in commercial and non-commercial applications.

License

Tonic is Open Source, published under the GNU Lesser General Public License. You will find the complete license text here.

Release history

This is the release history, describing the changes for each released version of the Tonic look and feel.

Tonic and NetBeans

The Tonic Look and Feel works well with NetBeans. However, due to a bug in NetBeans, you have to take one extra step to get it up and running correctly.