Funnily enough, I gave up on Netbeans 6.9 because it was soooo slow to react to input !
It is a really well-thought-out, user friendly IDE (much better usability curve than Eclipse imho), but I couldn't stand the constant scanning it does for some reason or the other, and slows the world down.
You can turn of "Enable auto-scanning of sources" which makes it loads better.
But netbeans will still have to scan projects from time to time. I've had to keep just a small number active at any time to prevent it from scanning too much and slowing down.
responsive compared to what trash? Eclipse IDE has better performance on most OSes and the Adt plugin in fact keep sup with the google sdk releases unlike nbandroid plugins...which at times you are waiting 3 months for an update to match the current android sdk.
I can't really argue with you because I'm only speaking from my own experience, but although with nbandroid I might wait 3 months for an update, with Eclipse I would wait 3 months for the code completion popup.
You might want to edit your eclipse.ini and give it more memory[1] ... It worked like a charm for me on my Mac. The linux boxes I use don't have this problem.
[1] The properties you want to change are: launcher.XXMaxPermSize, XX:MaxPermSize, Xms, and Xmx
Now that you mention it, it wasn't shy about how much memory it wanted to use either, but I'll give it a try next time I need to use Eclipse for something - thanks.
Code completion in Eclipse was a killer for me as well. I switched back to Netbeans for Android development (used it for php and python before) and was very happy. The only reason I switched to Eclipse in the first place was because all of the Android books and tutorials I found used it and it was easier to follow that way.
Haven't used Eclipse for a while, but I'm pretty sure the amount of time you wait for the pop-up is a setting. Set it to zero and it's instantaneous on most modern hardware.
No, this is a full "IDE locked up" kind of delay - and it's not just code completion, the whole thing feels sluggish compared to Netbeans. This is both on my Windows desktop and my MBP, so I guess the only thing left to blame is the size of the codebase I'm working with.
I can't stand Netbeans on Linux because of the awful Swing font rendering. Eclipse respects the font settings of my desktop environment. Netbeans looks terrible no matter what.
I get that response sometimes, and it almost always turns out the person that thinks the text "looks fine" is not using AA, subpixel rendering, etc.
I snapped a picture of a GNOME menu overlayed on top of Netbeans, so Netbeans' complete failure to match the fonts of the GNOME desktop is made crystal clear: http://bit.ly/eSQy3d
I'm running KDE/Fedora as my main machine, and Netbean fonts made my eyes bleed. This precipitated a flurry of searches as to how to fix the problem -- my desktop fonts are pretty, but the Netbean ones are awful.
Rather quickly you'll find that there are two tracks, one is to change the config/command line parameter to launch it (I believe it's: -J-Dswing.aatext=true), the other is to use the official Oracle JVM/JDK, and version 6, along with ensure Netbeans is launching with that (see JAVA_HOME). It has better font rendering/handling. I've done the former, but haven't bothered with the latter, as I prefer Fedora managing my packages.
I think Netbeans is not getting the font settings from GNOME. From what I can see from the panel, GNOME uses slight font hinting here. But the Netbeans window uses full hinting.
The fix would be to roll our own matching ~/.fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf for all the non-GNOME applications.
As of the last time I tried Netbeans (I have long since moved exclusively to Vim), this was not successful either. I have my font preferences replicated in ~/.fonts.conf and I could not get Netbeans to use those settings either.
Looks like they've dropped Ruby support. That is too bad. Netbeans was a pretty good IDE for ruby development. I wonder what motivated the decision to drop ruby.
No Python love either. There's a clear constraint on the amount of engineering resource that Oracle is putting into NetBeans. So they are targeting their resources for where they think it is most needed.
The ruby plugin is available on the netbeans plugin site, http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/38549/ruby-and-rails , it has not been verified for 7.0 yet, but it does install. Once its verified I guess it will show up in the plugin manager.
I use NetBeans 6.9 currently at my corporate job to edit PHP, and some of the enhancements have me excited. Notably:
- It uses native file listeners to detect filesystem updates. Awesome. I often use some other mechanism to create files and it's lame how slow NetBeans picks them up.
- Rename refactoring now works in PHP... I always wondered why it gave me the error that "rename refactoring won't work in this context". Now I know "this context" was PHP.
Can anyone who has been running the beta for a while comment about how NetBeans 7 stacks up to IntelliJ IDEA 10? I am trying both out, but I'm new to IDEs and some opinions from those with more experience would be helpful.
I haven't used Netbeans, but IntelliJ is fantastic. The editor is fast and responsive, and features such as completion, inspections and refactoring work very well. Most of the professional Java developers I know use IntelliJ.
Right at this moment I'm using NetBeans 7 and RubyMine (which is basically IntelliJ for Rails) simultaneously; RubyMine for Rails and NetBeans for PHP.
They're running on a 2 year old macbook upgraded to 5gb ram and a 7200rpm drive. Both are nice and snappy and more than good.
IntelliJ and NetBeans are both really good IDEs. I'm a NetBeans fan and I prefer having several projects open at a time. With intelliJ you can have only one project open.
And also as a maven guy I prefer NetBeans. E.g. download sources + javadocs is done with one click for dependencies of your project.
You can have multiple projects open in IntelliJ. When you open a second project, it prompts to open it in a "New Window" or "This Window". The confirm dialog has a "remember" option, which you can reset under Prefences -> General -> "Confirm window to open project in".
IntelliJ can also download Maven sources + javadocs automatically via Preferences -> Maven -> Importing -> "Automatically download". Otherwise, you can download manually by selecting the Maven Projects tab and clicking the download icon. Opening a Maven project with IntelliJ is really easy: just open the pom.xml and it will automatically create the IDE project.
It's such a breath of fresh air having a responsive IDE... now all I need is a responsive phone ;-)