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I've used Android-Studio for a long time, and I got used to it over Eclipse.

I wish to create an SWT app for PCs (windows, Linux, macOs) , and use a nice UI mechanism like Window-Builder that used to exist for Eclipse.

Is it a possible thing to do on Android-Studio or IntelliJ ?

If so, how?

android developer
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  • What I don't get ... why do you want to use android-studio to create a non-android app? And keep in mind: Jetbrains claims that IntelliJ is such great technology because they focus on delivering the best-in-class Java editor to you. You know, when you want the powerful platform with all the many plugins ... maybe you should check on eclipse again. Finally; isn't that one of these "tooling/library" questions that only newbies ask for? ;-) – GhostCat Mar 19 '16 at 21:17
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    I ask this because Android-Studio is based on IntelliJ anyway, and having 2 IDEs that are about the same is not needed. About Eclipse, it's just the editing of SWT apps that I want to have. Last sentence isn't something I can answer. :) – android developer Mar 19 '16 at 21:34

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There is no visual UI editor like WindowBuilder to create SWT UIs in IntelliJ.

But you certainly can create SWT applications with IntelliJ or any other non-Eclipse IDE for that matter. In my opinion, UI designer are overrated and UIs can be equally well implemented by hand. Thus if you are willing implement the UI in code you simply need to get a copy of the SWT library and you are set.

If you follow the redirects from this question it will guide you to maven artifacts of SWT: maven project: SWT 3.5 dependency: any official public repo?

Note that SWT comes with a native part that might make extra settings necessary to launch your application.

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Rüdiger Herrmann
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  • I mostly use UI designers for preview of what I did, and to learn how to handle relatively new/rare stuff. It was a very long time ago that I used SWT, so a UI designer can help a lot. I use the UI designer on Android-Studio mainly to show how it looks, because there, there is a huge time wasted on build&run (time from when you press Run, till it actually runs on the device). About IntelliJ, that's too bad. Thank you. – android developer Mar 20 '16 at 07:44
  • I see, makes sense of course. With SWT the time to start an application is tremendously shorter than on Andoid. There is a collections of self-contained snippets that demonstrate commonly used features of a widget https://www.eclipse.org/swt/snippets/ to start with. That's of course not as fast as the feedback cycle of a visual designer. Seems your choice is to go back to Eclipse for the visual designer or live with the lag in IntelliJ or use a different UI toolkit altogether. Or use Eclipse only to try things out. – Rüdiger Herrmann Mar 20 '16 at 13:08
  • indeed. Also, now that I started SWT again, I have to say that Android UI handling is much easier to handle, in terms of readability , which UI-components are available, and the connection between them. – android developer Mar 20 '16 at 14:09