Here’s a good example of some bad user interface design in my favorite IDE.
I know the Maven stuff is a plugin, so I’m guessing NetBeans allows plugins to install tabs under “Miscellaneous”. So what you end up with is a configuration screen that looks simple until you find out that there are really supposed to be 30 tabs instead of 7, but they are hiding out in the Miscellaneous section.
I work with some people that like spaces and some people that like tabs in their code. I don’t really care, so I try to follow whatever the project is using. I ran into a big problem with Netbeans, though, in that it seems like getting it to use tabs only is impossible. It turns out they appear to be following a weird part of the Java Code Conventions spec:
Four spaces should be used as the unit of indentation. The exact construction of the indentation (spaces vs. tabs) is unspecified. Tabs must be set exactly every 8 spaces (not 4).
http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConventions.doc3.html#262
So, Netbeans sort of has two different “numbers” around tabs. There is a number that says how many spaces a tab should appear as, and a number that says how many spaces should be used when you indent something. By default a tab appears as 8 spaces, but a level of indentation is 4 (like the spec says above). As a result, it inserts four hard spaces when you indent one level, and a tab if you indent two levels. The solution is to set the two numbers to the same value. Just a wee bit confusing for a new user.
Here’s a bug report where someone describes it:
I think this is week 3 of Netbeans now, so I’ve used it a bit longer than planned. I found a couple of things that are annoying.
I have finished my week of Netbeans usage and so far am pretty impressed. I was able to go all week without using Eclipse once. A large part of that is thanks to the fact that I’ve been using Maven 2 for a large number of my most recent projects. If you have a pom.xml, Netbeans will be able to check out your project and open it without you doing a single bit of configuration. This is great, since it goes a long way in preventing IDE lock-in. If you are working on a Maven project, you can use Netbeans easily, even if everyone else is using Eclipse. I didn’t get very deep into working on non-Maven projects, so that may have been quite a bit more hassle. All in all, though, Netbeans has come a long way since the last time I gave it a serious test. Here are some of my favorite features:
I may give Netbeans another week. It should be pretty obvious to anyone that it takes longer than a week to fully get a feel for such a complicated piece of software.
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