This is my NetBeans IDE, and how I work
By Jonathan Lermitage on Monday 25 February 2013, 19:40 - NetBeans IDE - Permalink
NetBeans is a powerful and highly customizable IDE. Let me explain how I use it everyday :
- move the status bar to a friendly place : the top-right corner. I did it because our eyes naturally check the screen from top to down and left to right, so the bottom-right corner is tiring to watch and you lose the attention of the rest of the screen quickly. Web-designers know this fact and adjust their website layouts to make them pleasant to use. Then, move the NetBeans status bar by adding the following parameter to the
netbeans_default_optionskey of theetc/netbeans.conffile :-J-Dnetbeans.winsys.statusLine.in.menuBar=true. - the NetBeans local history is a great feature, but it is limited. You may prefer a versioning system like Mercurial. Simply create a local repository for each project : it doesn't consume a lot of resources and you'll take advantage of all the features of a versioning system : labels, patchs, a complete historic, etc.
- don't spend too much time by invoking the NetBeans menus : the toolbar exists !
- don't wait to enable and place your favorite panels like the console, your versioning system(s), etc. Do it now and save time.
- on large projects, you'll probably spend time scrolling in the Projects and Navigator views. Simply separate them.
- I don't like the default editor font used by NetBeans. I customized it and change some colors to make it more comfortable for my eyes.
- a cool feature : go to
View
and enable theSynchronyze Editor with Views
option. A simple click on the editor will select the corresponding file in the Project / Files panels. - don't spend time searching for JARs to add to your (Ant based) Java projects : elaborate a list of libraries (
Ant Libraries
). In addition, this is an easy way to maintain dependencies versions of your projects : some projects use theGoogle Guava 12
outdated library ? Simply upgrade this library withGoogle Guava 13.0.1
and the job is done. - last but never the least, two other useful tweaks for the
netbeans_default_optionskey of theetc/netbeans.conffile :-J-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=truemay fix connectivity problems if you're on an IPV4 network with an OS that supports IPV6; and-J-XX:+UseCompressedOopswill make your IDE to consume less memory and run a little bit faster if you're running on a 64-bit JDK/JRE.
Here is the screenshot of my IDE (warning, this is a 1920 by 1080 PNG picture) :
And you, what's your NetBeans tips ?
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Comments
How do you put the statusbar there?
I simply added the "-J-Dnetbeans.winsys.statusLine.in.menuBar=true" parameter to the etc/netbeans.conf file, in the netbeans_default_options section.
Mine looks like this:
netbeans_default_options="-J-Xverify:none -J-Xss2m -J-Xms512m -J-Xmx1024m -J-XX:PermSize=160m -J-XX:MaxPermSize=256m -J-Dnetbeans.winsys.statusLine.in.menuBar=true -J-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -J-Dplugin.manager.check.updates=false -J-XX:+UseCompressedOops -J-Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -J-Dsun.java2d.dpiaware=true -J-Dsun.zip.disableMemoryMapping=true -J-Dsun.awt.disableMixing=true -J-XX:HeapDumpPath=C:\TEMP\nbheapdump.hprof"
I am on Linux and I always append
--laf com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel
to netbeans_default_options in $NETBEANS_HOME/etc/netbeans.conf
...and Netbeans looks more eye-candy afterwards!
For improving responsiveness, a good tip is also to append
-J-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -J-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -J-XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled
to the property above.
Happy hacking with Netbeans!