Jan Lahoda's Blog

New Features in NetBeans IDE, part 1 - Improved Coloring

As you can probably imagine, the NetBeans development did not stop with NetBeans 5.0 and NetBeans 5.5. A new version of NetBeans, which is already being planned, is supposed to bring many new features. I would like to describe some of them here. Please note that all I will present here is preliminary and subject of change.

One of the most visible new features is extended coloring in the editor. The code should be colored not only according to the lexical information (aka syntax highlighting), but also according to syntax and semantic information. For example, fields should get a different colors than local variables, etc.:

Additionally, also content for Javadoc comments and string literals should be colored to allow better orientation:

And last, but not least, the unused elements will be detected and shown in gray:

Many more new features and improvements are planned: improved code completion, improved code templates, editor hints improvements, and many others. Stay tuned for details.

Posted at 03:13PM Jun 19, 2006 by lahvac in NetBeans  |  Comments[316]