Setting the focus to a text field

In a JFrame or JDialog you can always overwrite the setVisible() method, it works well. I haven't tried in a JPanel, but can be an alternative.

@Override
public void setVisible(boolean value) {
    super.setVisible(value);
    control.requestFocusInWindow();
}

For me the easiest way to get it to work, is to put the component.requestFocus(); line, after the setVisible(true); line, at the bottom of your frame or panel constructor.

This probably has something to do with asking for the focus, after all components have been created, because creating a new component, after asking for the focus request, will make your component loose te focus, and make the focus go to your newly created component. At least, that's what I assume.

I have had a similar scenario where I needed to set the focus on a text box within a panel when the panel was shown. The panel was loaded on application startup, so I couldn't set the focus in the constructor. As the panel wasn't being loaded or being given focus on show, this meant that I had no event to fire the focus request from.

To solve this, I added a global method to my main that called a method in the panel that invoked requestFocusInWindow() on the text area. I put the call to the global method in the button that showed the panel, after the call to show. This meant that the panel would be shown and then the text area assigned the focus after showing the panel. Hope that makes sense and helps!

Also, you can edit most of the auto-generated code by right clicking on the object in design view and selecting customize code, however I don't think that it allows you to edit panels.

I'm not sure if I'm missing something here, but there's no reason why you can't add a listener to your panel.

In Netbeans, just hit the "Source" button in the top left of the editor window and you can edit most of the code. The actual layout code is mostly locked, but you can even customize that if you need to.

As far as I'm aware, txtMessage.requestFocusInWindow() is supposed to set up the default focus for when the window is displayed the first time. If you want to request the focus after the window has been displayed already, you should use txtMessage.requestFocus()

For testing, you can just add a listener in the constructor:

addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter(){ 
  public void windowOpened( WindowEvent e){ 
    txtMessage.requestFocus();
  } 
});