Question

I am wondering if it’s possible to change the default radio button menu item appearance in Java Swing.

By default a circle with a dot inside will indicate the selected state of the button, but i just want the good old fashioned tick next to a selected menu item and nothing to be shown next to an item that is not selected. (All items in question are of type JRadioButtonMenuItem)

I tried to use .setSelectedIcon(...) which can be found here :

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/javax/swing/AbstractButton.html#setSelectedIcon(javax.swing.Icon)

But nothing changed, no exceptions thrown and im still stuck with the default appearance.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Instead of using a JRadioButtonMenuItem, you could use JCheckBoxMenuItem which has a tick mark by default. JCheckBoxMenuItems can also belong to a ButtonGroup also giving you single selection behavior shown by JRadioButtonMenuItem.

Example