
NetBeans IDE 8.0 - conductor
https://netbeans.org/community/releases/80
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dmm
NetBeans is slick. I just finished a small java/swing project to make a
desktop data conversion tool. I don't have much experience with java and
almost none with IDEs but I was pleasantly surprised.

I found the editor to be decent and had good emacs bindings, even enabling the
"tab goes to proper indent" behavior. The debugger was very good. It was able
to easily manipulate the various threads of the program and quickly find a
problem. The build files that NetBeans generated were well designed and I was
able to easily add some build actions.

My only other experience with an IDE was visual studio in 2004 in my freshman
c++ classes. That was huge pain. Nobody really understood what it was doing.
And problems were regularly solved by creating a new project and copy-pasting
code from the old to the new. On the other hand VS may have been great and
it's the additional 10 years of experience that made the difference. haha

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peterashford
Yup. Netbeans was the IDE that finally dragged be away from Emacs. Well, at
least for Java programming, I still use Emacs for pretty much everything else
:o)

I never quite get why there are so many people so keen on Eclipse. Always
seems slow, hard to configure and (to me) less intuitive than Netbeans. Ah
well, each to their own =)

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dolphenstein
Netbeans 8 is great for HTML5/JS work as well. Been using the beta version for
AngularJS development the past 2 months.

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pjmlp
Netbeans JavaScript support is great.

Good enough autocomplete, integration JSLint makes you aware of possible
errors as one types and there is the integration with a myriad of JS
frameworks.

Really nice.

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skrowl
Have you tried Brackets or JetBrains WebStorm? If so, how does it compare as
far as HTML/CSS/JS dev?

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pjmlp
No I have not.

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passwert
Ah Netbeans! I remember using this IDE during my university time - and it
still looks like shit after so many years :)

Take a good look at what JetBrains did.

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brokenparser
IntelliJ also looks like shit. It has its own toolkit and the same horrible
font rendering as any other swing program. If you want your IDE to be pretty,
try Eclipse.

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__xtrimsky
you are really mentioning Eclipse as a pretty IDE or is it a joke ? :P

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virtualwhys
If we're talking Linux, then yes, IntelliJ is a gruesome sight indeed.

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Yetanfou
Not in the guise of Android Studio, using the Darcula skin. It is actually
rather pleasant to look at, as far as IDE's go. Just make those humongous
fonts a bit smaller and it looks quite sleek. I wonder why so many Java apps
insist on using oversized fonts and features, especially since Swing was
introduced?

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thejosh
Font rendering is still horrible on Linux compared to Sublime.

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pjmlp
It is my favourite Java IDE.

Granted it was a bit shitty around 2003, when it still used mounts points and
a virtual workspace concept. It was also a bit sluggish back then.

When they changed the architecture to drop those concepts, base their build
systems on top of Ant/Maven and optimize their UI resource usage, it became
great.

Not to forget the work started by JRuby team that helped improve the support
for dynamic languages, to the point it feels almost like Java.

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billrobertson42
That work was done by Tor Norbye who worked on the core Netbeans team at the
time.

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pjmlp
He is now driving the Android Studio development, right?

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pippy
Netbeans is by far the most powerful PHP IDE out there. The intellisense like
search, jumping to definitions, code re-factoring, file search, integrated
debugging, and code analysis makes everything else look like a joke.

It's not the most prettiest IDE out there, but it's free and open source. It's
the visual studio of PHP and java, only better. And open source.

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theg2
I take it you haven't tried PHPStorm then? We used NetBeans for a long time
until we tried out PHPStorm and it is amazing how much better and faster it
is.

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knieveltech
I was totally into netbeans until an update broke it in my environment (java
issues)> I grudgingly switched to phpstorm about six months ago. Wouldn't even
consider going back to netbeans now.

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thescrewdriver
Netbeans has always impressed me. It's a very solid IDE, but I moved away from
it after they decided to ditch more and more non-java language support. I'd
still pick it over Eclipse though. IntelliJ is my current tool of choice,
mostly due to their Scala support.

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neverminder
The official Scala IDE is Eclipse based though ([http://scala-
ide.org/](http://scala-ide.org/)) and I trust that people who develop the
language itself are best suited to develop the IDE as well. Plus I hate the
fact that both Netbeans and IntelliJ are developed on top of Swing and it has
that forever-not-fixed issue with font rendering on some major linux distros -
Ubuntu just to name one.
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15053069/netbeans-on-
ubun...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15053069/netbeans-on-ubuntu-font-
look-and-feel)

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pjmlp
Except their plugin tends to not play nice with other ones, like the Groovy
one.

So in the end, one needs multiple Eclipse installations for different types of
work.

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smrtinsert
Uh what? I use the groovy plugin and scala ide plugin just fine and a bunch of
others.

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pjmlp
It might be the case now. I had lots of issues with JDT and aspects being used
by both plugins last year.

Since then I always use separate installations.

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norswap
I find the comments are not very helpful. I am myself familiar with Eclipse
and IntelliJ IDEA (my assessment based on experience is that both are equally
powerful and pleasant to use, excepted that IDEA is much much more stable).
How does NetBeans compare? Does it have any specific feature worth mentioning?

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skyebook
Being free from the tyranny of Eclipse workspaces is, on its own, damn nice.

If you're the type that likes your version control integrated in your IDE, SVN
and git feel much more natural in NetBeans than the Team Provider
implementations in Eclipse. Eclipse requires navigating to the source control
perspective, adding the repository, checking out, and then selecting the
option to look for projects which you can open in your workspace.. its not
exactly a smooth process. NB is more akin to what you'd do if your terminal
was open.

In terms of stability, NB definitely wins there. Never crashes and none of the
typing slow downs that used to bug me [what seemed like] all the time in
Eclipse.

The one incredibly irritating thing about it is the way it forks processes
when running via maven. Start an http server with netty and hit stop, the
process is still running. I've taken to doing most of my testing from a
terminal, which is a somewhat janky process I've forced myself to get used to.

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pjmlp
Remember mount points? At least the Netbeans developers learned that
workspaces as Eclipse does it makes no sense.

I really love being able to use Ant and Maven as project files, without
internal IDE lifecycle builders like Eclipse requires.

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voidlogic
"I don't often program in Java (anymore), but when I do, I use Netbeans" \- Me

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finishingmove
NetBeans is probably the best free IDE out there. I've used it before
switching to Jetbrains' products which I believe are superior. Eclipse on the
other hand was making me sick every time I tried to use it...

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cturhan
I've been using NB from Java to C++, PHP to Javascript for about 6 years. I
tried others but nothing is like NB believe or not.

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cross37
Around 2007 I started a major Java project using Eclipse on Linux. It would
work well for awhile then freeze for no particular reason, sometimes the
project settings would get trashed and I'd have to create a new project and
move all the source code over to it. Once day after running some updates,
Subversion stopped working. The Eclipse subversion plugin wouldn't update
because of some plugin dependency problem. Plugin updates didn't work all that
well in general.

So, I decided to check out NetBeans. I have tried years before (4.0 ish) and
wasn't all that impressed, but 6.0 had just come out.

Everything just worked.

No special plugins needed, It seemed more responsive, SVN worked fine. Plus it
supported PHP and c/c++, both of which I would need for the project.

The other developer and myself switched to Netbeans and never looked back.
I've been upgrading Netbeans with each release and will probably upgrade to
8.0 this weekend.

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hubtree
I've found NetBeans to feel less resource hungry than Eclipse, or IntelliJ
IDEA, on my linux box. It also feels more intelligent than Eclipse when
offering suggestions or code completion. I've, overall, been extremely pleased
with it. I also prefer it aesthetically over Eclipse, for what that's worth.

The transition from Eclipse is really smooth, and there are many helpful FAQ's
on the subject if you need it. I've been recommending it to friends since I
made the switch a few months back.

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wambotron
I used netbeans when I was doing a lot of Java dev. Since I've stopped, I've
been using Komodo and it serves my purposes. I don't particularly miss it, but
if I go back to more java dev, I'll be downloading netbeans first thing.

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Justsignedup
I just tried it out, unless I am missing something, it does not support AOP.
Which basically makes it worthless for me, my project uses AOP.

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castor_pilot
Netbeans is nice. Especially with the jvi plugin, that makes vimers feel right
at home.

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k3liutZu
Oh man they need a designer.

