Disable scrollbar when content is lower than viewport ?

Question

Hi,
I have a vertical scrollbar always showed (JScrollPane.VERTICAL_SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS),
but I want it to be disabled when the content in the viewport is lower than the viewport's height.
Take for example Chrome browser in Windows: when u open up Google, the content of the page is quite low in height and the scrollbar in Chrome will be disabled. As soon as you have enough content on the page the scrollbar will be active.
How can I achieve this ?
Thanks

Answer 1

Hello,
It's not really a problem, I just realize it is a SWING limitation, (...)
Almost all app have this behaviour; it isn't really nice visually.I don't have Chrome, and haven't seen this behavior anywhere so far (but admittedly, I'm way behind in terms of GUI fashion).
The behavior that I'm used to (and that Swing designers apparently believed to be the norm too), is that a scrollbar disappears when the width of the view does not justify it ( SCROLLBAR_AS_NEEDED ). Using SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS implies that you want the scrollbar there, no matter whether the view's width deserves it. How the scrollbar looks in this case sounds like a Look and Feel choice instead (I only have oldish OSs, but maybe you know an Operating System where this behavior is the norm? In this case yes, it is a limitation of the corresponding Swing L&F).
maybe there was some workaround.Considering this is not in the OS LAF, this can be "manually coded", by listeneing to resizing events and accordingly changing the scrollbar's appearance.
Assuming the "disabled" scrollbar appearance is what you're after (no idea, it's just an example, if that doesn't suit your need you may do something else in the placeholder code), here is a, admittedly rather dense, workaround.
Notice how the vertical and horizontal scrollbar looks different (I only applied the workaround to that latter).
import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.GridLayout;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.JScrollPane;
import javax.swing.JTextArea;
import javax.swing.event.ChangeEvent;
import javax.swing.event.ChangeListener;
public class TestDisableScrollBar extends JPanel
    private static final String SHORT_TEXT = "text";
    private static final String LONG_TEXT = "texttexttexttexttexttexttexttexttexttexttextte";
    private static void createAndShowGUI()
        JFrame frame = new JFrame("Demo");
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        JTextArea textarea = new JTextArea(5, 5); // just to take up some space.
        final JLabel label = new JLabel(SHORT_TEXT);
        JPanel view = new JPanel();
        view.setLayout(new GridLayout(2, 1));
        view.add(label);
        view.add(textarea);
        final JScrollPane widget = new JScrollPane(view, JScrollPane.VERTICAL_SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS, JScrollPane.HORIZONTAL_SCROLLBAR_ALWAYS);
        widget.getHorizontalScrollBar().setEnabled(false);
        widget.getViewport().addChangeListener(new ChangeListener() {
            public void stateChanged(ChangeEvent e) {
                widget.getHorizontalScrollBar().setEnabled(
                        widget.getViewport().getWidth()<
                        widget.getViewport().getView().getWidth());
        frame.getContentPane().add(widget, BorderLayout.CENTER);
        JButton alternateText = new JButton("Switch width");
        alternateText.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                label.setText(label.getText().equals(SHORT_TEXT)?
                    LONG_TEXT : SHORT_TEXT);
        frame.getContentPane().add(alternateText, BorderLayout.SOUTH);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible(true);
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                createAndShowGUI();
  }