While working on the first Java project after switching to the NetBeans IDE, I collected some notes about things which didn’t work as expected. This is a followup to my first NetBeans on Mac OS X post.

Issues

Where appropriate I added these items to the NetBeans issue tracking system and noted their bug ids.

1.) Double-click-drag selection doesn’t work as expected. With double-click-drag selection I mean double-clicking a word and keeping the mouse button pressed on the second click. In every other Mac OS X text editing environment, this selects the entire double-clicked word and then allows me to drag-extend the selection in increments of entire words instead of character-by-character. In NetBeans, the double-click is ignored, it behaves like a regular single-click selection. The regular behavior is especially useful since I have mapped the middle mouse button (wheel button) to a double-click. [89607]

2.) Triple-click-drag selection has the same problem, it doesn’t work as expected. In BBEdit or Cocoa text views, triple-clicking text selects the entire line or paragraph. Dragging up or down selects more lines. It’s a very convenient feature. In NetBeans, triple-clicking selects the word under the cursor and then starts a drag for the word. [89607]

3.) (Seems to be fixed when running under Java 6) Turning the scroll wheel with the shift key down doesn’t scroll horizontally. Horizontal scroll using the trackpad and I guess mighty mouse also work under Java 6. Nice :-)

4.) (Seems to be fixed when running under Java 6) The code editor sometimes loses keyboard input focus in a strange way. There’s no cursor and I can’t enter text anymore. Bringing up and dismissing the preferences recovers from this state. To reproduce: in method of class A invoke a non-existing method in class B. Allow the assistant to add the method to class B which will also jump there. Switch back to class A and the editor should be in the whacked state now.

5.) I am unable to reproduce this reliably, but from time to time NetBeans does not accept some keyboard shortcuts. For example, I was unable to assign Ctrl-Left to an action for the longest time. Now it suddenly works again.

6.) Maybe someone can tell me how to achieve this: I want to use Cmd-J for “Go to Line...” but Cmd-J seems to be a special shortcut which is combined with additional letters to create multi-key sequences. I have to press Cmd-J twice now, the first time it initializes a special mode that waits for a second keystroke, and the second time it actually brings up the line number dialog.

7.) (Also fixed by now?) Moving diagonally into a submenu usually means that the mouse cursor hits other menu items on the parent level before it reaches the submenu panel. Mac OS X has a grace period for such mouse movement so the submenu panel doesn’t immediately disappear again. I’m pretty sure that this grace period wasn’t present in NetBeans, and I also remember that the small arrows indicating a submenu looked different when I had this problem. Well I won’t complain if it’s fixed for good :-)

8.) I’d like to control the font in the Output pane. There doesn’t seem to be a way to change this.

9.) The default font size is too big, causing list items to use up too much space, e.g. in the navigator. When I set a smaller one with the --fontsize option in ~/.netbeans/5.5/etc/netbeans.conf, the font is smaller, but the line spacing stays the same, which is useless if the point is to pack more list items into the same space.

10.) Maybe I’m using the wrong function, but WSDL validation only provides primitive XML validation. In Eclipse, the feature validates on a higher level, up to WS-I profile compliance, which is what I need.

Running under Java 6

Here’s what I did to make NetBeans run under Java 6:

In /Applications/NetBeans.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/platform6/lib/nbexec change “1.5” to “1.6” in these two lines:

The default graphics engine renders my coding font really, really ugly and it does’t use subpixel-antialiasing (which I absolutely need). This is why I switched to the Quartz rendering engine as described by Apple. I did this in my personal netbeans.conf file which you can see below.

You can also see how I changed the memory, font size and file encoding parameters. File encoding because the last encoding I’d ever want is the platform default Mac Roman.

Plugins someone should write

Someone should write these. Maybe I’ll do it :-)

• Select Line including the trailing linefeed
• Something like “Use Selection for Find”