How to remove border around buttons?

Question

I have a JPanel with the GridLayout. In every cell of the grid I have a button. I see that every button is surrounded by a gray border. I would like to remove these borders. Does anybody know how it can be done?

Answer 1

Border emptyBorder = BorderFactory.createEmptyBorder();
yourButton.setBorder(emptyBorder);

For more details on borders see the BorderFactory

Answer 2

yourButton.setBorderPainted(false);

Answer 3

In most recent Java versions it's necessary to call setContentAreaFilled(false) to remove the border entirely. Add an empty border for some padding:

button.setBorder(BorderFactory.createEmptyBorder(4, 4, 4, 4));
button.setContentAreaFilled(false);

Answer 4

I think it's very likely the borders are part of the buttons' GUI. You could try calling .setBorder(null) on all the buttons and see what happens!

Answer 5

While all of these answers work in some way, I thought I'd provide a little more in depth comparison of each along with examples.

First default buttons:

Buttons with border painted set to false removes the border and hover action but keeps the padding:

button.setBorderPainted(false);

Buttons with a null border or empty border removes the border, hover action and padding:

button.setBorder(BorderFactory.createEmptyBorder());

or

button.setBorder(null);

Buttons with an empty border plus dimensions removes the border and hover action and sets the padding to the provided values:

border.setBorder(BorderFactory.createEmptyBorder(6, 6, 6, 6));

Lastly, combine these with a background and hover action to get custom matte buttons that get highlighted on hover:

button.setBackground(Color.WHITE);
button.setBorderPainted(false);

button.addMouseListener(new java.awt.event.MouseAdapter() {
    public void mouseEntered(java.awt.event.MouseEvent evt) {
        button.setBackground(Color.GRAY);
    }

    public void mouseExited(java.awt.event.MouseEvent evt) {
        button.setBackground(Color.WHITE);
    }
});