For whatever reason, the latest release of Netbeans was giving me some issues. Over at “Java How To…” was an excellent short piece on avoiding common Java heap space configuration errors in all sorts of containers, environments, and IDEs. It’s one for your bookmarks.

Another tip – close the Tasks pane – it triggers excessive scanning on large projects. Open it when you have the opportunity to. But the last thing you want is to shut down with it open – it will simply make start up intolerable if you have a very large project opened.

There is an open ticket working on the worst offender keeping me from adopting Netbeans enthusiastically – excessive “Project scanning”.

While I live in Emacs, Eclipse won me over for Java development a long time ago. I’ve been keeping my eye on Netbeans for a while. Each major release I’ve given a try by checking out a current project from SVN and attempting some basic development tasks. Usually I’d hit a snag that would discourage me just enough to not get over the hump. Netbeans 6.5 has been different so far, so I’m going to give it an honest try now.

Some notes:

1. Choosing View | Show Versioning Labels makes it easier to cope with having multiple versions (branches) of the same project open.

2. In OSX, Netbeans, like many non-CLI applications, does not respect terminal set environment variables (.bash_profile, etc). This handly Python script updates your “~/.MacOSX/environment.plist” file from your environment variables. Set up a cron job and you’re done.

3. This handy guide to Mac keyboard shortcuts is a keeper.

The Visual GC Module looks like something to try out.