NetBeans (IDE) Tip #1: Project Groups
My coworker showed me a great feature of NetBeans that any developer would do well to learn – it’s called Project Groups. You can see a small screen cast illustrating the concept here.
The general idea is that NetBeans remembers a set of projects and the associated open files as a Project Group; when you switch between project groups, your settings from the last session are restored. This is illustrated in the above linked video, but it doesn’t show the main reason I like it so much, namely the ability to create Project Groups automatically from specific folders on the hard drive.
The feature is accessible via File -> Project Group -> New Group.
If you have multiple projects you are juggling, you can create one project group for each project root folder, and then switch between them easily.
I don’t often go digging through menus, so I am indebted to my coworker pointing this feature out to me; I use it on a daily basis and it helps ease the burden of context switching by hiding all the irrelevant projects.
I use this feature to group my test servers seperately from my live servers, so I avoid ending up accidentily working on the Live server! 🙂