Thread: How to change color of JMenuItem when mouse is over it

I'm just thinking out loud here, but does any generic JMenuItem react in any way when you just hover your mouse over it (highlights or something)? If so, that would be an indicator that JMenuItem has a built in listener to process a mouse hovering over it. If it has a built in listener by default, we just need to figure out what type of listener it is an override it to do what you want.

When mouse hovers over background color and foreground color change. Text becomes black, background becomes very light_blueish. This is the default and I have no idea how to overwrite that. With mouse listeners I tried using print statements but nothing happened.


Edit: Ok using mouse listener I managed to get color to change, I added so that color changes when mouse enters. While mouse hovers color is the same old but when mouse moves away it goes to green. So i'm assuming I need to over-wright hover over mouse function somehow, any ideas?

If you wish this to apply to all JMenuItems across your application, use the UIManager to set the look and feel defaults for MenuItem.selectionBackground and MenuItem.background.
...otherwise, JMenuItem extends JComponent so anything applies there (such as add listeners and setting its background/foreground)

Originally Posted by Bagzli

On final note what would the command be to change TabbedPane selected Foreground? I couldn't figure that one out.

For future reference, you can iterate over the UIDefaults to check the UI options available and search for the specific key you need to set the UI default value

UIDefaults ui = UIManager.getLookAndFeel().getDefaults();
 
for ( Object o : ui.keySet() ){
	System.out.println(o.toString());
}

The above code will print the keys available, which you can then search for the appropriate syntax to use for the value you need