I was googling about and came across this article by Daniel Fischer. I kind of understood what he was getting at and it made me happy because:

a) I take the aesthetics of my working environment very seriously (which was one of the precursors of me leaving windows), and was glad that someone else understands that an IDE should be beautiful,

b) I’d clearly been so in love with netbeans that I had accepted her as “having a nice personality”

It’s true, when I first got netbeans I thought she was rather, how shall we say it…?.. plump, in the gui department. I remember the first couple of days trying to make a few changes here and there.. however, I fell so head over heals for her that I forgot all about this.

Until now.

Daniel called my gorgeous netbeans ugly, and while she’s not the cocoa supermodel that textmate is, I thought that was a little unfair. So, having been familiar with the gui for some time, I decided to trim some of the gui clunk out. Here’s what I came up with: bare gui Click here for a bigger pic

I think this isn’t a bad comparison to textmate, imho, and certainly a fairer comparison than Daniel has on his site. That’s not a swipe by the way, if I remember right, I didn’t quite grok the netbeans way when I was first using it and couldn’t work out how to hide some of the toolbars (maybe it was a bug in earlier versions?) – in fact I commend Daniel, because in the image in his comparison, you can see he has turned some of the extra gui features off – if he was being a dick about it, he honestly could’ve made netbeans look worse than a couple of broads I’ve found myself with thanks to “beer goggles”.

It got me thinking though, that perhaps some others might like to know that netbeans can have a very textmate like gui. Simply do this:

  1. Go to the view menu and deselect pretty much everything (I keep line numbers and diff sidebar),
  2. Go to preferences click on fonts and colors and select “city lights” – note that this isn’t quite the textmate colour scheme yet, and you also have to edit it – for example I’ve noticed that my classes are Black on black – if you look in the large image you’lll see they’re missing,

Note – you can also right mouse click on menu strips and get rid of them from the context menu.

I also found that you can dock the project window, something you can’t do in textmate, like this, which is arguably even nicer than textmate’s drawer feature.

Projects window is hidden,

bare gui

Click on it and it pops up

bare gui

It dissapears again if you open a document or click elsewhere.

I guess netbeans will never be as “snappy” as textmate – it zips around very quickly, but I also guess that textmate will always be a (superb) text editor and netbeans will be a fully fledged, extremely slick and well integrated ide. For those of us who love that textmate look, I guess all we’re waiting for is for someone to port over the colour scheme and for the netbeans dev team to let us know how we can share colour schemes with each other, to save any repeated work…

So for now I’ve lost any trace of textmate eny I had: If we follow the chick analogy one last time we can say that Netbeans’ personality is far superior to textmate’s she’s smart, on the ball and cultured – and now, thanks to Daniel’s article, she’s just as, if not better looking too!