NetBeans turns 10
It's NetBeans' 10th birthday and to celebrate I thought I'd write a quick blog post about how I use the NetBeans IDE to develop Dvorcode.
Posts about editor (old posts, page 1)
Unicode chars between Emacs/X11 cygwin and Win32
I'm using Emacs/X11 on cygwin as my main editor (when stuck on work's machine) and Emacs 22's Unicode support really rocks. However, getting it to pass unicode between the kill ring and Windows /X11 clipboard doesn't work out-of-the-box (mainly because Emacs thinks it's on a Unix host). The fix is easy though:
Pretty-printing XML with Emacs' NXML-mode
Did you ever get a stream of XML out of a log file, or in a data stream, and it's all mashed together without line-breaks so that it just appears as gobble-de-gook? If there's a data error (not an XML parsing error) then you have to read it so that you can find where the error is, but you don't have XML-spy and NetBeans is overkill or takes forever to fire up...
Emacs to the rescue! Benjamin Ferrari wrote this increadibly useful (and simple) elisp function to pretty-print a block of XML code:
Compiling JNLP projects under stock NetBeans 6.x
This is a pretty simple issue that was easy to solve but took a bit of fumbling around...
I recently checked out the new Java SwingSet3 project from it's SVN repo, to play around with it. It's a NetBeans project so it was simple enough to fire up NetBeans 6.0 and use it's built-in Subversion support to check the project out from the repository directly...
My plan was very simple: check out the code with NetBeans, build it, run it (using JDK 1.6.0_10 beta for the new Nimbus look/feel too) and then hack at the code.
Essentials to make Windows almost bareable
Okay, so I hate working in Windows, but on my employer's equipment at least, I must live with it. After having had this machine replaced twice (faulty Dell hardware) and rebuilt more times than I can remember (Windows BSODs), for a total of at least 3 system migrations this past year, I thought I'd better keep a list of what free software to install on top of Windows, and what adjustments to make, so that at least I don't feel like I'm wearing a straight jacket. Here goes:
Monospace fonts
I finally got fed up enough with Courier New to start searching for a legible, monospace font to use in jEdit. In Emacs, I'm particularly fond of the standard X font "misc-fixed" (though it's a little tough to tell appart O and 0 still). But for jEdit, the Java monospace font seems to map to Courier New in Windows, and to some God-awful font on Linux.
jEdit macros, vs. Emacs functions
I've been playing with customising jEdit a little bit, and decided to have a go at writing some simple date insertion macros. These perform the same work as some old elisp functions I wrote years ago in Emacs, to insert date/time stamps in various formats. In my .emacs file, I bind these functions to short-cut keys, and then use them for updating Changelogs in code and in offline journal entries.