Question

I’m using Netbeans on Kubuntu 12.04. I frequently have to work with 30+ documents open for editing at the same time. Finding and switching between them is not easy in Netbeans 7.2, so I decided to take the time to formally ask about it here.

1. The tabbed interface does not wrap, thus only a single line of tabs necessitates hitting the tab scroll button to find that out-of-view tab. Thus a bit tedious to find the file (tab) to click from the tabbed interface. The fact that tab order is not preserved between projects (when they are re-opened) does not help much either.
2. The document list pop-up menu (accessible via the button with arrow next to the tab control) is OK, but is not scrollable when dealing with large lists. Document sort order cannot be altered (alphabetical only). Thus not possible to always find the file to click from that popup.
3. The other option is the file tree or project file list. Since the files are distributed across many directories, this is of course possible, but time consuming.

All the above gets even harder when there are multiple files with the same names across multiple directories forming part of the same project. (That all said, Netbeans’ approach works great when you have only, say, 5 files open having different file names in the same directory. Unfortunately I’m not that lucky.)

This is in sharp contrast to Kate (Kubuntu’s fantastic advanced text editor). Kate has a simple list of all the open documents in a project listed on the left (by default), which you can sort according to either document name, document path, or the document opening order. Nifty! So simple and effective I always find that file in under a second.

Just a single click and you’re done. Here, have a look:

Thus I have two questions:

1. What’s the most effective way of switching between a lot of open files in Netbeans?
2. Ideally, is there a way to emulate Kate’s open-file-list functionality in Netbeans 7.2?

Update:

There is an excellent nbExpose plugin that I have now finally found (been around since 2008) that does a decent job: http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/11826/nbexpose

I’m accepting @joachim-rohde answer since he pointed out helpful ways and suggested that one could simply resort to plugins.

I still believe this functionality has a place in the IDE, of course.

Answer 1

I’m not aware that Netbeans is able to mimic Kates behaviour. A few other possibilities you haven’t mentioned:

• CTRL + Tab – shows the list of open files in order of last access (CTRL + Shift + Tab selects the previous file)
• Shift + F4 shows open documents, but only in alphabetical order
• There is a Open File Fast plugin which might be worth a look (haven’t used it myself)

With the first approach I personally get along quite well.