David Botterill's Weblog

Saturday October 13, 2007

NetBeans 6.0: Making Me a KeyBoard Junkie

I was recently at a conference giving a demo for the new NetBeans 6.0 editor features.  In preparing for the demo and actually doing it,  I realized that reducing keystrokes is huge for developers.  I've been so accustomed to broken IDEs where I had to cursor and mouse around that I didn't realize how much NetBeans 6.0 editing has improved until I was in the middle of this demo.  I actually got a rush hitting the "Enter" key and seeing smart code completion save me lots of keystrokes.  I'm becoming a keyboard junkie (no sneering from the emacs crowd) so now I'm looking for more keystroke saving key bindings.  A great resource to get started on Java editor enhancments in NetBeans 6.0 is the Java Editor User's Guide on the NetBeans public Wiki.  Two keystroke and mouse saving features I recently found useful are AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) selection and Next/Previous Tab.

The AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) keymap is listed in the "Tools->Options" (Preferences on Mac OS X) under the "Keymap" heading.  The actual setting is "Other->Select Next Element/Select Previous Element".  This lets you select things like a keyword, a line, and a block of code.  The default key mapping is "Alt-Shift-PERIOD" (Ctrl-Shift-PERIOD on Mac OS X) to select more and "Alt-Shift-COMMA" (Ctrl-Shift-COMMA on Mac OS X) to select less.

I found out about Next/Previous Tab in Gregg Sporar's blog.  But I couldn't get this to work so I did some investigation.  On Mac OS X the default key binding to do a Next Tab is "Meta-PAGE_DOWN".  To get this to work you need to press "Meta-Fn-PAGE".  Pressing three keys at once really doesn't save me much so I remapped this to "Meta-DOWN" and "Meta-UP".  Note that you will have to "Remove" these key mappings from the "Other->Insertion Point to End of Document" and "Other->Insertion Point to Beginning of Document".



Posted by david ( Oct 13 2007, 11:55:31 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [3] | |