Maybe a dumb question, but it would be nice if there was a way to hide or collapse Java annotations when viewing source in Netbeans (or Eclipse). I’m not finding an option and a quick search didn’t turn anything up.
Is this one of those “you should never want to do that, code folding is a sin!” things?
Personally I’d find it useful for annotated entity classes. All the hibernate / etc annotations are just fluff that I never look at once my mapping is working fine. It’s similar to imports, really.
(Yes, I can use XML instead of annotations, which I might start doing. But I was just wondering…)
Having only used Eclipse or IDEA, I’m unaware of any IDE options to hide annotations, and in my opinion it’s a good thing.
Your annotations affect the way your code compiles and often, how it runs. In my opinion hiding them is tantamount to hiding
public/protected/privatekeywords in method signatures, or any other component of the language. Their exclusion changes the meaning of their surrounding context and therefore, a developer’s expectations.