Creating a fancy search bar with Swing components

I'm trying to come up with an elegant recreation of the search bar component in Thunderbird. The clear button doesn't appear until there is text in the box, so that screen-shot is a bit inaccurate.

Should I use a layered pane and get some buttons to float above the box? (but then getting the text to not appear below the buttons would be hacky)

Maybe just put buttons at the ends of the search bar and have it somehow blend in?

Any ideas or maybe a style开发者_如何学JAVA reconsideration is welcome, thank you.

What about a white panel with a border and a JTextField without borders inside. Two buttons (or more) in the west and east. Button will appear/hide depending on the text field content.

You might be able to use the Text Prompt for the "Search all text" display.

Check out JideSoft's Common Layer and the Overlayable class.

Demos

For building a very similar component I've used JXLayer (for drawing the buttons) in conjunction with IntelliHints from JIDE OSS project (for implementing a drop down list of values).

This code adds a label with given icon to the right of the JTextPane. One thing to work on: don't let the text go under the label. You can use setMargin(), but it shifts the label too.

    JTextField searchField = new JTextField(30);
    searchField.setLayout(new BorderLayout());
    JLabel label = new JLabel(icon);
    label.setCursor(Cursor.getDefaultCursor());
    searchField.add(label, BorderLayout.LINE_END);
    label.addMouseListener(new MouseAdapter() {
        @Override
        public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) {
            searchField.setText("");
        }
    });