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This weekend I have been playing with NetBeans 6.5 RC2 look-and-feel. The mission was to make the editor look better on my monitor. Issues similar to this has also been addressed several times on codinghorror.com. I have a 22 inch TFT VGA monitor from Acer. They call it P223w and it is crap. Actually it is good for a lot of things, but working with highlighted text is not one of them. I have tried pretty much everything including:

• cleartype tuning (I am on Vista)
• monitor settings
• trying different monospaced cleartype and bitmap fonts
• upgrading JRE
• trying NetBeans on Linux (ubuntu)

Nothing seemed to work, but I noticed that changing the editing area background to a dark grey did make the fonts look a lot better. I normally prefer to have a white background, but I was willing to change that.  Now, if only I could make the rest of the NetBeans interface dark… This wasn’t possible in NetBeans itself, so I started to look for a solution. After a little searching I came across NimROD look and feel. After some tweaking off a NimROD theme and changing of few of NimROD’s icons, I came to fairly decent result. You can see the result on this screen shot. It is not perfect, but it is ok. You can download my theme and my version of the jar-file here.

How to

NimROD is easy to use with NetBeans. Just download a .jar file and theme modify the target of your NetBeans shortcut like so:

"C:\Programmer\Webudvikling\NetBeans\NetBeans 6.5 RC2\bin\netbeans.exe" -J-Dnimrodlf.themeFile=DarkGrey.theme -cp:p C:\nimrod\nimrodlf.jar --laf com.nilo.plaf.nimrod.NimRODLookAndFeel

Shortcut target

I have put the jar-file and theme file in the NetBeans bin folder, but I guess you can put it anywhere you like. Just modify the NetBeans shotcut to reflect your setup. Please notice that your shortcut will most likely be different from mine.

The NimROD theme controls the colors of the Java Metal theme. If you want to modify the theme, then go to the folder where you put the jar file and run it:

 java -jar nimrodlf.jar

NimROD’s theme editor allows you to load the theme file, edit the colors, and preview the changes to see the effect they have on the various interface elements. The beauty of the solution is that it doesn’t make any changes to NetBeans. If you don’t like it, you simply change the shortcut target back to the original.

If you want different icons or make other changes to NimROD’s behavior, then go here to get the source and further info.

I recently tried the NetBeans IDE for PHP. I must say it is excellent! I have worked as a PHP developer for a couple of years, and in that time I have tried several PHP editors and IDE’s. NetBeans used to be exclusively for Java, but now it supports all kinds of programming languages including Ruby, C++, and PHP.

When I review a code-editor I look for:

• good basic editing features for manipulating text
• flexible syntax highlighting and shortcuts
• automatic indentation
• code completion
• bookmarks
• cliptext or other ways of inserting fequently used code-snippets
• good search and replace features
• options to extend functionalty (through scripting)
• price (NetBeans is free)

Nice, but not mandatory:

• integrated subversion
• diff-viewer
• debugging
• code folding
• database tools

I don’t know how easy it is to extend NetBeans, but it does meet all my other requirements.

For about a year I have been using PSPad for all my editing needs. Before that I use Notepad++ and Dreamweaver. PSPad is an excellent editor and has all the benefits that IDE’s do not (usually) provide. Most importantly it opens really fast, wich is very handy for quick editing of existing files. It also has a lot of great little features that you don’t often see in other editors. I will still use PSPad when I need to do quick hacks, but for lager projects I think there are great benefits of using an IDE, especially a powerful one such as NetBeans. You can get a glimpse of some of NetBeans editing features here and here. The NetBeans PHP learning trail is also a good place to learn about features and how use the IDE for PHP development.

Overall I think that NetBeans for PHP is far better than Eclipse (for PHP) and I also think that it is a serious competitor to Zend Studio.