After digging a bit deeper into the Swing API, I was able to achieve what I set out to do when I posted this question. Here is an illustration of the outcome:
In order to help anyone who might come across a similar problem in the future, I will post my own answer to this question.
First, regarding the foreground (text) color of the accelerator menu shortcuts, the only way I could get it to work was setting some application wide flags using UIManager.
UIDefaults uiDefaults = UIManager.getLookAndFeelDefaults();
// For Windows L&F:
uiDefaults.put("MenuItem.acceleratorForeground", Color.lightGray);
uiDefaults.put("MenuItem.acceleratorSelectionForeground", Color.lightGray);
// For Nimbus L&F:
uiDefaults.put("MenuItem:MenuItemAccelerator.textForeground", Color.lightGray);
Next on the list was finding a way to apply the custom "skin" to the separator items in the menu list. The way to do this was to call the menu's add(Component c) method instead of the more common addSeparator(), while passing to it a JSeparator component. First, you would need to create the JSeparator object and set its properties before adding it to the menu. To simplify things, I created a helper class:
public class XMenuSeparator extends JSeparator
{
public XMenuSeparator(Color bgColor, Color fgColor)
{
super.setOpaque(true);
super.setBackground(bgColor);
super.setForeground(fgColor);
}
}
Which can subsequently be used as such:
myMenu.add(new XMenuSeparator(Color.darkGray, Color.lightGray));
Where myMenu is a JMenu instance (or as we will see next, an instance of our other helper class, XMenu).
Last on the list was figuring out how to customize the menu list (background color, foreground color, and most importantly, the surrounding borders around the menu list). The first two customizations were pretty straight forward, using setBackground(Color.darkGray) and setForeground(Color.lightGray), with the only consideration needed was setting the opacity to true: setOpaque(true).
As for the surrounding border that had preserved the default background colors, and where the initial attempts to customize it using JMenu's setBorder had failed, the solution was to actually set the borders of the menu list and not the menu command button itself (obviously!) as such:
JMenu myMenu = new JMenu("File");
myMenu.getPopupMenu().setBorder(new LineBorder(Color.gray, borderThickness));
And so to encapsulate all those steps (and some additional functionality of switching back and forth between the default and "skinned" looks), here's a simple helper class:
public class XMenu extends JMenu
{
private Color skinBgColor = Color.darkGray;
private Color skinFgColor = Color.lightGray;
private Color skinBorderColor = Color.gray;
private int skinBorderThickness = 1;
private Color defaultBgColor;
private Color defaultFgColor;
private Border defaultBorder;
private boolean defaultOpacity;
private void saveDefaults()
{
defaultBgColor = super.getBackground();
defaultFgColor = super.getForeground();
defaultBorder = super.getPopupMenu().getBorder();
defaultOpacity = super.isOpaque();
}
public XMenu(String s)
{
super(s);
this.saveDefaults();
}
public XMenu(String s, Color bgColor, Color fgColor, Color borderColor)
{
super(s);
this.saveDefaults();
this.setSkinProperties(bgColor, fgColor, borderColor, 1);
this.applySkin();
}
public XMenu(String s, Color bgColor, Color fgColor, Color borderColor, int borderThickness)
{
super(s);
this.saveDefaults();
this.setSkinProperties(bgColor, fgColor, borderColor, borderThickness);
this.applySkin();
}
public void setSkinProperties(Color bgColor, Color fgColor, Color borderColor, int borderThickness)
{
this.skinBgColor = bgColor;
this.skinFgColor = fgColor;
this.skinBorderColor = borderColor;
this.skinBorderThickness = borderThickness;
}
public void applySkin()
{
super.setOpaque(true);
super.setBackground(skinBgColor);
super.setForeground(skinFgColor);
super.getPopupMenu().setBorder(new LineBorder(skinBorderColor, skinBorderThickness));
}
public void stripSkin()
{
super.setOpaque(defaultOpacity);
super.setBackground(defaultBgColor);
super.setForeground(defaultFgColor);
super.getPopupMenu().setBorder(defaultBorder);
}
}
And now, one could simply instantiate this class for the menu lists:
JMenu myMenu = new XMenu("File", Color.darkGray, Color.lightGray, Color.gray);
Hopefully this helps anyone who comes across this posting!
