Johan's blog
Still using NetBeans
I started using NetBeans 6 more than 2 months ago, and I am still using it.
People knowing me are very surprised. I typically don't use an IDE for more than 1 week, and then I go back to vi. Let me be clear, I am still using vi for most of my programming. But there are some tasks that I now prefer to do using NetBeans.
What I prefer to do with vi:
- making new classes
- writing code against API's I know very well
What I prefer to do with NetBeans:
- writing code against API's I don't know well
The NetBeans functionality I am probably most happy with, is the "navigate to source" and "find usages" option. When using external software, I often want to know what is really happening when I call a method. Browsing through the code using the above mentioned functionality is much easier than grepping files and inspecting them with vi.
One of the reasons I abandoned IDE's in the past so quickly is that I am working on different systems with different capabilities. At this moment, my laptop is not really powerful enough to run NetBeans 6. It would be a blocking issue for me if I couldn't work on my laptop, using the same code as when I would be using NetBeans.
With NetBeans, this is no problem. I am not losing any time with merging code. NetBeans is working on the same files, without creating dependencies. The nbproject directory is not added to the CVS, and my laptop doesn't know that I'm working on desktops using NetBeans and vi at the same moment.
I already upgraded to NetBeans 6.0.1. I am curious myself how long I will manage to use an IDE this time.
