Customizing the appearance of the visual editor

You can control how and whether views and palettes are displayed in the visual editor.

By default, the visual editor for Java shows the Design and Source views on a split pane, and the component palettes are included in the Design view. If you prefer to have more space to work in, you can choose to stack the Design and Source views on separate tabs, rather than tiling them. You can also move the divider to show more or less of the Source view. In addition, you can also choose to show or hide the palette in the by using the small arrows next to the palette.

  1. Specify your general preferences for visual editor display:

    1. Click Window > Preferences to open the Preferences window, and go to the Java > Visual Editor page.

    2. On the Appearance tab, specify whether you want the Design and Source views to be tiled (Above each other with a split pane) or stacked (On separate notebook tabs).

    3. Select the with palette in editor part check box to display the palette by default. Otherwise it will be collapsed.

    4. Select Open Properties view to automatically display the Properties view when the editor opens.

    5. Select Open Java Beans view to automatically display the Java Beans view when the editor opens.

    6. Click OK to apply your preferences and close the Preferences window.

  2. Open a Java file in the visual editor and customize the appearance and layout of the visual editor:

    1. Click and drag the divider between the Design and Source views, or use the arrows on the divider, to adjust the size of the Design and Source views. For example, if you are not looking at the code at all, you can collapse the divider by clicking the small down arrow.

    2. Drag the border of the palette to adjust its width, or use the small arrows on the border of the palette to collapse or open the palette. For example, if you have finished adding components to your Java class, you can close the palette to give you more design area to work with.

 

Parent topic

Setting visual editor preferences

 

Related tasks

Specifying visual editor preferences for code generation
Making the visual editor the default Java editor