Geertjan's Blog
- May 25, 2012
Power Boost for Alt-Shift-F in NetBeans IDE 7.2
I recently made a YouTube movie about the new "bulk reformat" feature in NetBeans IDE 7.2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VDzvIjse8g
At the end of that movie, I mentioned that Alt-Shift-F, which is the key combination for reformatting, only works in editor documents, not when nodes (e.g., project nodes, such as shown below) are selected:
However, there's been a very cool enhancement to this feature:
http://hg.netbeans.org/jet-main/rev/97907d0789ef
This enhancement is not in NetBeans IDE 7.2 Beta, but it will be in the final NetBeans IDE 7.2 release. It is already available in the development builds, such as a build I downloaded yesterday:
As you can see, when you look at the "Format" menu item in the list of menu items above, the Alt-Shift-F key combination is available even when nodes are selected. What does that mean? That means that in NetBeans IDE 7.2 (but not yet in NetBeans IDE 7.2 Beta), you'll be able to select multiple projects, or multiple packages, or multiple folders, or combinations of these, and then you'll be able to press Alt-Shift-F on your keyboard, after which ALL the files within the selected nodes will be reformatted, all at the same time.
Now that's pretty cool and make the IDE even more comfortable and intuitive to work in.