I’ve always been a textmate user since I started web development with rails and OSX ( 2 years give or take ). Textmate is in my opinion a great text editor. Notably the best that I’ve ever used. with the recent release of Netbeans 6.8. I thought, why not give it a try, see what an IDE can offer that a text editor can’t.

Here’s what I think:

Pros:

  • Search is pretty fast when project indexing is complete. ( faster than textmate’s project search )
  • Its not very slow after startup ,its near textmate fast ( although textmate is one of the slowest text editors I’ve used especially if working on a big project )
  • A dark theme can be installed.
  • Most of the textmate code templates are available.
  • Code folding works as it should.
  • There are plugins to put in more features.
  • Code is analyzed for errors in realtime.
  • Code auto completion that works.
  • Its Free.

Cons:

  • tremendously slow when starting up.
  • eats up a lot of ram, and cpu.
  • doesn’t have a built in dark theme.

In addition, I changed some shortcut keys since I’m already used to textmate’s keybindings.

To conclude, I think I’m falling in love with netbeans. Especially with the search and autocomplete feature. Although its too early to really say that I’d stick to using it permanently. But I really like using it as my main editor.