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Quickly Navigating between files in NetBeans

Been a few days since I started the "increasing Java developer productivity with NetBeans" series.

I suspect there are some new NetBeans users who want to know how to quickly navigate between files they have open in the NetBeans IDE editor, especially when they have many files open, or the file name lengths are pretty long and the file name tabs at the top of the editor window quickly use up the available space.

This blog describes ways to quickly navigate between open files in the NetBeans IDE.

There are a couple options to quickly navigate between files. If you're a point and click kinda user, you can select "Window | Documents" from the NetBeans IDE main menu. If you're a key stroke kinda user, you can press "Shift-F4". In either case you're presented with a list of documents/files you have open in the editor. Here's a screen shot of that dialog.

Once you have this dialog in front of you, again if you are point and click kinda user, you can click on the file you want to view in the editor. If you are a key stroke kinda user, just start typing the name of the file you want to load in the editor. NetBeans will automatically pop-up a quick search dialog and begin to match a file name with the string you have entered. For example, I have a file named AppLaunchAction.java loaded in the NetBeans editor and I want to quickly navigate to a file named Component3DGroupMigrationAction.java. I can bring up the Documents dialog with Shift-F4 and begin typing 'Co' and the file named Component3DGroupMigrationAction.java is immediately selected. You can see this in the screen shot below:

As soon as the file you want to navigate too is selected, you can press <Enter> to view it in the editor.

If you do not want to use the Documents dialog above, you can also move back forth between open files that pressing <Alt-right-arrow> and <Alt-left-arrow>. This too is a rapid way of migrating between files in the editor.

Enjoy!

Posted at 12:52PM Dec 13, 2005 by charliebrown in Java  |  Comments[4]