Swing UI layout analysis

Question

I am working on extending an application which has a Java Swing GUI. I have extended the business logic and added the required functionality but now I wanted to improve the UI. I have never worked with swing before and the code is not easy to read at all.

Is there any way to analyse/identify the UI components while the application is running? I am using IntelliJ as the IDE.

Answer 1

Press CTRL+SHIFT+F1 while your program is running to see a dump of the Swing container hierarchy. Compare it to the listings mentioned here or here.