I have a program which uses the Robot class in Java to automate a bunch of keypresses and clicks. The problem I am encountering is not being able to set breakpoints on certain methods to debug because the focus would change when I skip to the next expression.
Is there a way I can bypass this by changing the default continue hotkey (F8) in NetBeans to a low-level keyboard hook that will check system wide?
The reason for this is because the macro I am designing runs too fast for me to see each action occurring. If I set breakpoints along the program, I must alt-tab to the IDE and continue to the next breakpoint, which, unfortunately, interferes with the macro.
If you need to interact with the system in a way that interferes with your program, you must separate your debugger from your program.
In other words, run the two on separate machines and do a remote debug from one machine to another.
The easiest way to do so if you don’t have or want to use two machines, is to run your program in a virtual machine. A cheap solution is to use vmware player along with a Linux distribution supported by Netbeans.