One of the great things about using native widgets, such as with SWT, is that the widgets can display with the current operating/windowing system theme. However, by default applications use the legacy Windows look and feel. For such applications use of themes requires an application manifest to be provided (details here).

In the Eclipse world this typically means adding a manifest to javaw.exe. Unfortunately Sun has chosen for native applications to use the legacy Windows look and feel, by not including the manifest with it. In order to use the current theme the SWT team have tried to make things easier, but doing so requires you to do the following (for Windows XP and later):

  1. Get the manifest file, there are two alternatives for this:
    • Download the file from here, or
    • Find the file included with Eclipse, inside the eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_3.x.y.jar file
  2. Place the file as javaw.exe.manifest to the same location of javaw.exe (for me this was the C:\WINDOWS\system32 directory)
  3. Start Eclipse. The about dialog box in Eclipse (shown below) should look like the figure on right, instead of the left. If it doesn’t work there are some more details also on the SWT FAQ.

Bottom of about dialog box - without and with XP themes

Thanks for Steve and Veronika (from the SWT Team) for the tip.