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Comment by tofflos | Hacker News Reader

I like the simplicity of it.

It has strong Maven-support, does code completion, suggests changes to my code, accelerates my typing with snippets and supports many common refactorings. I don't know how the quality of those features stack up against other IDEs. Maybe I'm missing out but I do feel that they are pretty good.

I give IntelliJ and Eclipse a test-drive from time to time but usually uninstall them within the hour.

Having said that NetBeans does have some flaws. Recently I've really come to appreciate the terminal integration in Visual Studio Code and would like to see something similar in NetBeans. The author of the article seems interested in native OS integration so perhaps we can expect to see some improvements in this area? ;-)

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It probably takes at least a week or two using another IDE to really get a feel for its strengths.

An hour is definitely not enough time to spend with IntelliJ. But use it for a couple weeks, and you’ll wonder why you ever used anything else.

Tip: print out the keymap and try out all the navigation features.

Love VSCode however had to start working with a Grails stack this year. Support for groovy and gsp not there but they are working on it... Rather, there seems to be movement in tackling the JVM based languages running along side each other. And by they I mean the various teams working on the extensions under the "Java Support" umbrella.

Not sure if any of those "Java Support" teams are really working on Apache Groovy support for VSCode -- they would be working on supporting growing JVM ecosystems (e.g. Java 11, Scala, Kotlin), not declining ones. Virtually every Grails stack out there is still using version 2, even though version 3 was released well over 3 years ago -- a sure sign of a declining ecosystem. Is the Grails stack you're working on any different?

It has been upgraded to Grails 3. I can't speak to the wider Groovy and Grails recent trends(I know they have been trending down in recent years), however Grails development seems to be picking up a bit and I'm certainly going to be dealing with it for the foreseeable future.

VS Code's Java support actually works really well now with a few rough edges based on a mostly Java project I was working with today. Unfortunately even when components are largely Java, a lot of testing and build scripting(Gradle) will be in Groovy. The terseness is nice for sure.. But it means leaving VS Code for IDEA.

> Recently I've really come to appreciate the terminal integration in Visual Studio Code and would like to see something similar in NetBeans.

What terminal integration would you like to see?

Visual Studio Code provides an actual terminal and allows the user to choose between different terminal implementations such as Bash and Powershell. It also comes with some well thought-out keybindings for switching focus between the integrated terminal and the editor.

On Windows NetBeans does not provide a working terminal out of the box, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32959347/netbeans-termin.... Also, while not strictly related to the terminal, the output window can not be used with System.console(), see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26078106/system-console-....

Fixing either of these two issues would go a long way for improving the workflow when developing interactive command-line applications.

Edit: Oh, and also https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NETBEANS-1783. ;-)

We do have Window | IDE Tools | Terminal but since I'm always on macOS or Linux I never tested to see if this feature has issues on Windows.

I'll test this and see what's going on there.

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