intellij-sdk-code-samples/user_interface_components/user_interface_components.md

title
User Interface Components

The IntelliJ Platform includes a large number of custom Swing components. Using those components in your plugins will ensure that your plugin looks and works consistently with the UI of the rest of the IDE, and can often reduce the code size compared to using the default Swing components.

Tip

Use UI Inspector to locate the underlying Swing component implementation or to inspect an existing UI at runtime.

Note

The recommended way of building UIs on the IntelliJ Platform (2019.2 and later) is using Kotlin UI DSL.

The following components are particularly noteworthy:

• Menus and toolbars are built using the Action System
• Tool Windows
• Dialogs
• Popups
• Notifications
• File and Class Choosers
• Editor Components
• List and Tree Controls
• Tables (TableView) (TBD)
• Drag & Drop Helpers (TBD)
• Miscellaneous Swing Components
  • Messages
  • JBSplitter
  • JBTabs