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".
Above all, trying hitting the "Enter" key when you're doing code
completion and you'll be amazed at just how smart the code completion
really is. Happy keyboarding!
Posted by David Botterill
( Oct 13 2007, 11:55:31 PM MDT )
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Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/david/entry/netbeans_6_0_making_me
Cheers Dave,
I really wanted to know how to select a line of text and google brought me to you.
Posted by Liam on November 19, 2007 at 05:41 PM MST #
With NB 6.0 and OS X 10.4 I'm finding that auto popup is quite flaky for code completion - most of the time I have to press CTRL-space. Is there some secret trick to getting this to work as advertised?
Posted by antirealist on December 04, 2007 at 10:53 PM MST #
antirealist,
Sorry but could you elaborate on "as advertised"? CTRL-space invokes the code completion window. Of course another trigger is ".". So you can always type "this." to invoke code completion for items within the scope of the current class. Of course you don't get the "smart" code completion.
Posted by David on December 05, 2007 at 12:34 AM MST #