Dirk.Net

Powerful find and replace with regular expressions should be the hallmark of every IDE worth its mettle. MS Visual Studio does it so-so, but lo and behold, Netbeans (at least in version 6.1) is even worse.

So I wanted to put foo at the beginning of every line in a text, which calls for a regex like:

^.*

and replace like:

foo $0

However, Netbeans only ever replaces the first match in a text, over and over again. It also hangs up easily in the process.

As with many a Netbeans quirk, it’s Quanta Plus to the rescue again:

Works like a charm.

The Netbeans 6.1 editor seems to have problems displaying UTF-8 encoded files (Linux Mint Daryna, Ubuntu Feisty), so a source file with Thai (and probably Chinese, Japanese etc.) will look like this if project encoding is set to UTF-8:

Changing font, project properties etc. won’t help, so before messing around to much and risking possible data corruption, here’s a workaround: Use Quanta Plus for editing, a fantastic editor I find myself using more and more and which hasn’t let me down. Here’s the section in Quanta Plus:

Both editors will pick up each other’s edits, so it’s a cinch to use them simultaneously to edit the same files.

If you get the “Could not connect to the server” error running you project from Netbeans while script/server works fine, first make sure you have the correct Rails version set for your project, it should show “Installed version: 2.2.2”:

If you still get:

Rails requires RubyGems >= 1.3.1 (you have 1.2.0). Please `gem update –system` and try again.

But the suggested

gem update —system

often fails to update your gem to the new version so try

sudo gem install rubygems-update

and then run:

sudo gem install rubygems-update

and check with

gem -v

where it should show 1.3.1 at the time of writing.

In Netbeans there currently (Version 6.1) is no built-in option to save a windows layout, you can only do a “Reset Windows”  (in the Window menu) to get back to the factory layout.
I’ve been looking for a solution to get a *cough* Visual Studio *cough* like layout (all navigation on the right of the code window) and found a great plugin called Perspective (click this link twice as for some reason on the first click it will give you the plugin home page) that lets you save a layout and switch easily between layouts (er, perpectives). You can’t download it using the Netbeans plugin installer as it’s not signed, so you’ll have to download and install from disk: