A previous tip, “Get a Hold of Swing Defaults,” shows how to obtain the default settings for Swing components. It is easy to change any default settings programmatically. For example, Swing scrollbars have a purplish thumb. In fact, if you get the default value for “ScrollBar.thumb”, you’ll notice that it has a default setting of:

 javax.swing.plaf.ColorUIResource[r=153,g=153,b=204]

To change the purplish thumb to a light gray thumb, you should first obtain a reference to javax.swing.UIDefaults (com.sun.java.swing.UIManager for Swing 1.03 and below) as in:

 javax.swing.UIDefaults uid = javax.swing.UIManager.getDefaults();

UIDefaults is an extension of ava.util.Hashtable class, so next you’ll write:

 uid.put("ScrollBar.thumb", java.awt.Color.lightGray);

Note that the changes to Swing’s default settings will take effect prior to creation of Swing components by your code.