Gregg Sporar's Blog

Unmark Occurrences

The beta release of NetBeans IDE 6.0 came out earlier this week. The entire feature list is lengthy, and instead of rehashing that here, what I have been doing lately is to focus on the "little things" that I have found while using the IDE. These are features that I particularly like or that might be easily overlooked.

One of these features in the editor is Mark Occurrences. It is pretty straightforward: put your cursor on something and the editor highlights all occurrences of that thing, be it a variable, method, method exit points, etc.

I should point out that this feature has actually been available for a long time now to NetBeans IDE users. The prolific Sandip Chitale wrote a plugin module for it long ago (I even created a screencast to demonstrate it). But in 6.0 the feature is included in the standard distribution.

Which is great. The only thing I'm not crazy about is that by default the highlighting marks stick around, even after I move the cursor away. The marks do not disappear until I put the cursor on something else that can be highlighted.

I would guess most folks prefer it this way, but I have always been a bit odd. :-) This is what user definable options are for - allowing each of us to do our own thing. In this case, Tools > Options provides:

The Options dialog not only allows me to control what sorts of things get highlighted, but I have also disabled the default "Keep Marks" option so that as soon as I move the cursor off of whatever was being highlighted, the highlights go away.

One final note: it appears that even though the control for Mark Occurrences is under the Java Code section in the Options dialog, the Ruby and JavaScript editors seem to abide by the setting of the "Keep Marks" option. I have filed an IssueZilla entry to get that improved....

Comments

• Thanks Gregg, that's been driving me mad for days now!

  Posted by: grimlock81 on September 23, 2007 at 05:52 PM

• "The beta release of NetBeans IDE 6.0 came out earlier this week. ... This feature has actually been available for a long time now to NetBeans IDE users. ... In 6.0 the feature is included in the standard distribution."

  I think you really meant to say "This feature has actually been available for a long time now to Eclipse IDE users". And you could also have added "in the stable release of the standard distribution".

  Personally, I'm fine with NetBeans implementing this feature, but please give credit where credit is due. The Eclipse implementation has been around since version R-3.0-200406251208. In my book, 3 years do qualify for "a long time", while "earlier this week" clearly does not.

  Posted by: rpoellath on September 24, 2007 at 10:57 AM

• @rpoellath:
  >I think you really meant to say
  No, I wrote exactly what I meant to say.
  >3 years do qualify for "a long time", while "earlier this week" clearly does not.
  My writing of "long time" refers to when Sandip first made his plugin available, which was in January, 2006.
  >but please give credit where credit is due
  Please note that I did not write that this feature was unique to NetBeans or that NetBeans was delivering it first. Speaking of giving credit, though, there are some who think Eclipse should give credit to IntelliJ IDEA for this feature - check out the comments here. :-)

  Posted by: gsporar on September 24, 2007 at 12:00 PM

• Absolutely, NetBeans is great, and has powerful functions.But I have to think that Eclipse is more friendly to developers :-)

  Posted by: jiangshachina on September 24, 2007 at 06:09 PM

• @Gregg:

  If the guys at IntelliJ were first to introduce this feature (and I don't doubt that), then I am one of those who think they should given credit for their innovation - by both Eclipse and NetBeans.

  I hate to nitpick, but I'm really getting tired of all the NetBeans hype on java.net.

  Posted by: rpoellath on September 28, 2007 at 09:09 AM

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