Sunday May 01, 2005

One of the optional plugins for NetBeans I rely on the most heavily, is the Jalopy plugin. It reformats source files (provided they are compilable). Unlike the built-in basic formatting, it performs all kinds of nice cleanup, like moving fields to the top of the file, enforces whitespace around if blocks, and so on. And it's extremely configurable - if you invoke the Jalopy Settings dialog from the Tools menu, you get the dialog shown on the right - plus a source file viewer on the right immediately showing the effects of your toggling of components on the options panel on the left. (Click on the image to see it in full size - that's true in general for all small pictures in my blog.)

I've gotten in the habit of hitting Ctrl-Shift-F10 after making edits to my files now, to immediately have the source file reformatted.

Of course, the first time I did this, I generated a huge number of CVS diffs in my module. People generally don't like that since it makes source code archaeology harder. But finding the original checkin comment for a reformatted line is still possible, so because of that I find that the benefits outweigh this disadvantage. In fact, I would be quite happy if the entire NetBeans source tree was reformatted too, since a couple of people checking in code in that code base (at least early on) like to put a space between function names and the parentheses -- foo (); and that drives me nuts!!

By the way, Here's my Jalopy settings XML file - you can import it directly from the Jalopy Settings file. This is basically the default JDK style, but I've increased the line length up to 100 instead of 80 columns, and I've tweaked the import organization. One thing I left alone was its parenthesis preferences, even though I like to omit some parentheses where it goes and puts them back in.

You can find the plugin NBM file for 4.0/4.1 here. Note that there is also a commercial plugin version of Jalopy for NetBeans, and it supports JDK 1.5 - which the current free plugin does not. I just started writing some JDK 1.5 code the other day - and loved every minute of it. The new language constructs and APIs are extremely handy.

I use some other optional plugins quite a bit too - I'll blog about them another time.