Posts about netbeans

My Favorite Text Editor in the 2020s

For decades, my favorite place to write has been in the venerable text editor / programmer's environment EMACS. It's a superb LISP environment, with a long history, is fantastically hackable, and has a mode for nearly everything.

But for the past three years, I've abandoned it for a new friend, from a most unlikely source: Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. You know, the Flight Simulator company ;-)

This is a big change for me. Why after all of this time have I done this? The simple answer is: it Just Works. It's EMACS' spiritual successor in many ways.

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Dark colours in NetBeans

Okay I'm still on the hunt for the elusive dark colour look-and-feel for NetBeans. I found this site that has great information about the NimROD L&F. This sets the widgets to a dark colour (or you could customise your own colours with NimROD).


Note that this is separate from the NetBeans colour themes which control editor colours. For that, I quite like Twilight and Aloha, although each needs tweaking to fix highlight colours for things such as breakpoints and step colours, or for highlighting code differences. Still, it's a good start.

NetBeans 6.5 and Python

NetBeans 6.5 is out! You can run it with the Nimbus look and feel too! There's also an Early Access plugin for Python. All very nice.


I recently had occasion to play with some Python at work (a small script to do some configurations, and I didn't want to do them in bash), so I took the time to get all of this set up. It's all so very easy and not worth writing about. However I thought that the interactive debugger (which is awesome, btw) has a small issue that needs resolving. Mean-time, here's a work-around.

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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.


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