[sukatoa]

Not clear,

You want to add the contents of the textField to JList?

Quote:

I looked for tutorials on using netbeans to use the add button to add to a jlist and I found nothing.

NetBeans doesn't support that feature(The programmer should do it)... it only initializes the contents when the ClassLoader loads that class.
Not dynamic...

try to use DefaultListModel, have experiments on it....
THere is a JList constructor that has a parameter ListModel...
You can pass that DefaultListModel to that parameter....

You may play with that.....