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I am currently reading about SWT. There is often written, that Eclipse as an SWT application looks like the standard GUIs of the host platform or OS. But I dont think so. At least under windows the tabs of the eclipse views does not look like the standard windows tabs.
Why is this?
Was this ever different?
What about other SWT application?
It really gives you native look and feel where possible. On some platforms you don’t find native versions of all the controls in SWT and then they have to be emulated.
Regarding the “tab controls”, SWT does support the standard tab control which is part of Win32 (and when you run it on OSX you will see one of the standard OSX tab controls, the blue) but Eclipse has created a new control that is much more flexible than the one you see in the Eclipse GUI. This is not at all an Eclipse specific thing to do, you see Microsoft develop extended controls for Office and there are non standard versions of controls in just about every software available.
One can argue if it is worth creating a control which does not look like what users are used to but in the case of the tab control, extending the standard tab control to the point where it had all the features eclipse uses would give just as much of a non standard feeling. IMHO, it is probably less confusing to create something that doesn’t even pretend to have the look and feel of the standard one but rather works identical on every platform where you can run eclipse.