Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Understandably, if you're creating an application and all your menu items suddenly have checkboxes, as shown below, you'll not be very happy. Debugging this problem is next to impossible. The only question you should be asking yourself if you see something like the above is: "Am I using JIDE?" As you can read here, the problem relates to JIDE and the fact that it overrides some global settings in certain cases. Thanks to Rob Terpilowski from Lynden in Seattle (where yet...

My first investigation into org.netbeans.editor.SideBarFactory is even semi useful. It parses Java files and shows colors to distinguish between fields (green), constructors (red), and methods (blue): Everything I know about org.netbeans.editor.SideBarFactory I learned from Andrzej Olszak who uses it in Featureous to distinguish code belonging to different features. Here's how to create the above: Register the SideBarFactory that you're going to create (I don't know how/if this...

Wouldn't you like to format a few files automatically, using the NetBeans built-in formatters, while NetBeans IDE starts up? Well, probably not. But in the case where you do want to do that, here's how: import java.io.BufferedWriter;import java.io.File;import java.io.FileWriter;import java.io.IOException;import java.io.InputStreamReader;import java.io.Reader;import java.net.URL;import java.net.URLConnection;import java.util.Collections;import java.util.Map;import...

A small social experiment. Take a look at this screenshot: Look at the packages. The package "cz.word.service.api" has a small icon stuck on the top left of the package icon. The package "cz.word.service.backward" also has a small icon stuck on the top left of the package icon. Clearly, the small icon top left of the first package icon is different to the small icon top left of the second package icon. Both are locks, but the first is open, while the second is closed. The...

Hey, everyone out there, you must have been using NetBeans IDE 7.0 and NetBeans IDE 7.0.1 for a while now! So, contribute 5 minutes of your time to the NetBeans IDE 7 Satisfaction Survey: http://netbeans.org/community/satisfaction_survey.html There's space in there to fill in the features you'd like in future releases and a big space right at the end for saying anything you'd like. As one of the people who constructed that survey, I can tell you for 100% sure that the results of...

With the upcoming NetBeans Platform 7.1, because of the new ability to add tabs to existing file editors, you'll be able to do this, i.e., you'll be able to add tabs to a file editor "from the outside", via a new plugin that you've created yourself: What you see above is a new tab in the Java editor, containing a LabelWidget from the Visual Library for each method found in the Java class. Here's the code and, again, note that this will work in NetBeans Platform 7.1 (i.e., a...

Read http://wiki.netbeans.org/EditorHistoryTab and you will find that with NetBeans Platform 7.1, associating new tabs to existing file editors will be easy and pluggable. I.e., you'll be able to create a new tab in one module and associate it with a file editor created in another module. Right throughout NetBeans IDE this functionality will be used to provide a History tab for all files that you can edit in the IDE, e.g., here's a Java file and, as you can see, there's now...

Tom's thread on nbdiscuss is getting some good responses. By and large, I believe (and am backed up in some ways) at this point, most topics relating to creating NetBeans Platform applications have been covered in one or more ways (thought could always be better of course), though on the side of extending NetBeans IDE editors, especially the parsing/lexing, etc, the documentation could be a lot better. That's partly because the parsing/lexing support has changed/been...

Below, "View1" and "View2" are both TopComponents positioned in the "explorer" mode. Hence, tabs are created, as always. However, in the 7.1 build I used to create the screenshot below, new group behavior is available to these two TopComponents, simply because they are positioned in the same mode: Now, any TopComponents found in the same mode can behave together, e.g., can be undocked together, moved together, minimized together, etc, which is what several NetBeans Platform...