Change LAF (look-and-feel) through plugin

[MatthiasDM]

Hi,
Would it be possible to change the look and feel of the interface through a plugin? Would be nice if the interface looked somewhat more modern.

[jonbartels]

The look and feel is not pluggable. I am trying to find notes and references about the look and feel

#3935 is the closest Mirth has ever come to supporting themes.

You should also look at threads from this forum search . There might be more details in the old forum posts than I can remember!

From my memory, a common request from my employers and customers is to change the logo. From what I recall even such a simple change requires recompiling code and also recompiling the client-side JARs. The logos are packaged with the JARs.

The Mirth theme is handled by JGoodies. Searching the code for com.jgoodies should find references about how it is used. In theory, JGoodies can support pluggable themes, however Mirth does not use JGoodies in a way that is pluggable.

Mirth specifically uses JGoodies Looks. It is not clear to me if Looks is still free under a BSD license or not.

I think the starting point to make the themes swappable or pluggable is:

1. Find out what JGoodies supports and how it supports themes
2. I think the themes would be first injected in this code:

   connect/client/src/com/mirth/connect/client/ui/Mirth.java

   Line 166 in 33977cb

   public static void initUIManager() {

3. There appear to be some tweaks or customizations to what JGoodies does based on a search for com.jgoodies
4. Mirth uses JGoodies from the looks-2.3.1.jar dependency. Is 2.3.1 a recent release? Do newer versions of JGoodies offer better features for swapping themes?

I hope that my memory is accurate. If you start hacking on this problem please post about it!!!

[MatthiasDM]

Will do, thank you for your detailed response!

[MatthiasDM]

I've had moderate success implementing a new LAF (FlatLAF) but due to the many custom components it has proven to be difficult to change all UI-elements. I'll try to change to logo and give some feedback.