Question

I would like to know if it is possible to retrieve the component containing tabs from a JTabbedPane, so that I could put it in a BorderLayout north position and the tab pane would be in the BorderLayout center position ?

Answer 1

I don’t see any point in doing that – by default tabs are in north position.

And also – no, you cannot do that anyway – you cannot separate tabs from tab content area since it is a single component combined by TabbedPaneUI. You can specify tabs position relative to content though using setTabPlacement method. For example you can change it to EAST placement:

JTabbedPane tabbedPane = new JTabbedPane ();
tabbedPane.setTabPlacement ( JTabbedPane.EAST );