Jan Lahoda's Blog

New Features in NetBeans IDE, part 2 - Improved Code Completion

Lets continue with our survey through newly planned features for a future version of NetBeans. Today, I would like to focus on one of the most important features of a modern IDE - code completion.

The code completion is undergoing a total rewrite. The new code completion should provide not only in much better performance than the old one, but also a handfull of new and cool features:

keywords suggestions: the code completion will propose keywords usable in a given context:

smart completion: a special type of the code completion which proposes only suggestions that match to the current situation by type. For example, if you type List l = new , the smart completion will only propose subclasses of List, like ArrayList:

smart completion for catch clauses: for catch clauses, only exceptions thrown inside the corresponding try block are proposed by the smart code completion:

suggestions of variable names: the code completion tries to infer a usable variable name.

filtering of suggestions by type: the code completion will propose only classes after extends clause, only interfaces afer implements clause and only Throwables after throw new.

code completion for Javadoc: it is planned that the code completion should work meaningfully only in the Javadoc comments.

Posted at 12:30PM Jun 26, 2006 by lahvac in NetBeans  |  Comments[52]