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.