Layout Manger to Freely place your objects

I am a self-taught java developer and I use IntelliJ IDEA for Java. Recently I saw a video on youtube in which the guy was using NetBeans and in his JFrame form, he was able to freely place his objects like JButton, JTextFeild, JLabel, etc. I am not able to figure out how to do that. In IntelliJ IDEA I found several layout managers such as Border, Card, Grid, Bag, etc. but none of them gave the desired result. can somebody please tell me how can I get a layout manager in which I can freely place all my objects and also freely resize them without any restrictions? Thank you in advance for any help.

In swing every component extends Container. That means that every component can have nested components (they all have add(Component) method). However, not all of them support the layout-ing of nested components.

What I want to say is, that you can add a component to a JButton, but a JButton is not capable of showing its nested components.

So, in order to have nesting, we use the components - containers that support the orientation of their nested components.

These components are all windows (JFrame, JDialog, etc...) and JPanels. There some others that support layout-ing a specific type of nested components. For example a JMenu is capable of showing JMenuItems properly.

Now, these "top-level"/empty containers are using Layout Managers in order to align-show their nested components. Based on the container's layout manager, the components are shown.

This is why you can't "freely" place the components into a JFrame. Because its Layout Manager is taking care of the components will be placed. So, what you are looking for, is to change its LayoutManager (use setLayout method) to one that allows you to freely place the components.

Guess what? There is no such layout manager. Simply because, it would have nothing to do/calculate since you are taking care the layout of the components. So, in order to achieve the "free" component layout, you must use jframe.setLayout(null);. In order to layout the components after it, you will have to use componentInsideJFrame.setBounds(...) and give it constant coordinates /dimension.

This is bad practice. A very bad one when it comes to UI. Giving a component static coordinates and dimension is bad. There are some questions you have to ask yourself.

What if user resizes the window? If the window is 301x301, the center of it, is at (150,150). So you place a component at (150,150). Ok it works. Now user resizes the window and makes it 501x501. The center is now standing at (250,250). But the component is staying at (150,150). There is the solution of setResizable(false), to this kind of problems, but how often have you used "uncapable of resizing" applications? What if user wants to resize it?

I hope you get it and understood what I am trying to say.

By using layout managers, you are solving this kind of problems easily, since the layout manager will take care of the resize and calculate the new center.

Yes. I know it feels weird, but all these youtube tutorials are not teaching you the correct way to make Swing GUIs. (This is a conversation for another day, I guess)

I truly suggest you read the tutorials of Swing documentation in order to get some ideas of how layout managers work. You will really benefit from those.

Finally, I suggest you to leave outside the whole "gui-builder-tool" thing. They seem to help you building your GUI, but they are adding so much additional/useless code and most of the times they are "bad UI creation" prone. Try to code the GUI by yourself.

At first, this sounds a bit harsh, but you can always run your application and see the result of the GUI. After some mistakes, you will finally be able to imagine the GUI result by only seeing the container.setLayout(..) and container.add(...) lines.