Joerg Plewe's Blog: Community: NetBeans Archives

Posted by herkules on January 28, 2007 at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The NetBeans source code editor is not known the be the ultimate one these days. From what I heard and saw, IDEA seems to be #1 in this respect today. But sometimes even small things have big effects and make work more enjoyable. Sandip Chitale created a set of linetools as a NetBeans module that nobody should miss. It gives a liteweight way to work with lines. It's very easy to move lines around or duplicate them (and then move around). The same works with multiline selections. Very handy, for it avoids prior selection of text in many cases.

Working with that reminded me of an editor feature I created in the glorious times when I was allowed to work in the Forth programming language (my all-time favorite).

Those days I had a line- and a character stack. A single keystroke allowed to swallow or copy lines or characters to the stack and spit them out at another place. This was one of the features you'll never miss again once getting used to it. Much better than the common cut/copy/paste based on selections.

Sandip, please, can you help me (again)?

C with NetBeans on Linux ... check it out!

Posted by herkules on December 21, 2006 at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

My current project is something with C on Linux. This is no fun, believe me. Especially when you are used to the rich development environment in the Java world.

What do we have on Linux? vi, emacs, make, kdevelop, gdb. Ouch.

Fortunately, Java tools reach out to that foreign, hostile world. First I tried Eclipse/CDT which works pretty well and I use it for my daily development. By far the best thing I could get hold of. The C/C++ module for NetBeans, which was at beta3 those days, was not in a productive state.

Today, I gave it a second try with all the brand new stuff. JDK6, NetBeans 5.5 and the new C/C++ development pack - surprise, surprise! It looks pretty polished and works like a charm.

NB/C wraps very nicely around existing Makefiles. This allowed me to browse a real complex project (>1mio LOC) within the IDE very soon. It also recognized the SVN structure immediately and guided me smoothly to checkin the NB projects just created. Another big plus is that it was very easy to create the NB projects completely separated from the source directories. I missed that in Eclipse (maybe it's my fault). And no more switching between 'perspectives' which I always found annoying. A matter of taste. Also, NetBeans 5.5 runs very smooth even on an X terminal.

So I had 2 lucky hours today exploring my new toy. Everything was so easy. Maybe tomorrow I will run into the issues. But thats OK for a first release. I'll just post the issues to the NB bug tracker. Typically they do respond quickly.

What I love about NetBeans is the speed of improvement. Subversion, UML, C/C++ and much more ... all that has been added just recently. So I'm really excited to see what comes next....

Pressing F5 all the day.... waiting for NetBeans 4.1

Posted by herkules on April 12, 2005 at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

These days I tend to press F5 in my favorite browser every couple of minutes. I'm visiting the NetBeans page and cannot wait the delivery of NetBeans 4.1 since the release branch is known to be taken.

Sure, 4.0 has been a big step in the development of NetBeans, but from my point of view (J2SE) introduced a lot of difficulties. I cannot judge how the benefits have been to the J2EE world, but I severely suffered from the new project system. It took huge efforts to create a NetBeans-compatible and usable project structure for the FlyingGuns project.
Ok, there have been 1 or 2 refactoring methods but that project system...
It brought me close to switching to Eclipse.

For I use to work with the 4.1 daily builds I can say there are huge improvements on that side. So I'm just too eager seeing 4.1 released so that I can convert my 4.0 projects into a much more usable form. For me, 4.0 could have been skipped. 4.1 now is the truely renewed NetBeans!

But there is more to look forward to:

multi-sourcedirectory projects (yeah!)
nice editor features (some not very obvious, like treatment of import) and more annotations
Ant debugger
the nice and completely new Navigator
import of Eclipse projects
direct usage of Maven projects
...

Just around the corner, the integrated profiler, improved version control and unit tests and much more is already waiting. The future is bright.

Seems today the release won't come any more. So I go home now. But tomorrow, maybe, I'll start pressing F5 again...

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