Paul Garcia: My Five Favorite NetBeans IDE Features!

continuing a series of articles focusing on netbeans users and their five favorite netbeans ide features , here's the next part, by paul garcia. -- netbeans team.

my name is paul garcia and i am currently a student working as a senior full stack developer at a startup in new york. i study i.t. at the new york institute of technology. the main stack i use is the mean (mongodb, expressjs, angularjs, nodejs) stack. during my free time i enjoy watching movies, eating great sushi, and taking vacations. i am working on a number of apps on the side.

what are your five favorite netbeans ide features?

1. control of workspace. to people with a laptop screen, going back and forth between screens becomes annoying. thanks to netbeans, you can simply split your screen in two in any direction you want to. this allows you to see two documents at the same time.  you can have them stack on top of each other or simply side by side.

2. click to run node.js app. for a mean stack developer, it becomes a hassle to hit the command line every time you run the app. netbeans has a great open source community that made a great plugin that allows you to run with just  a few clicks. there is also a stop button to kill the process.

3. html5 templates. html5 development is common for me. i love to use angularjs as my framework. netbeans makes creating a new project a breeze. you can get a new angularjs seed template app in less than 1 minute.

4. library downloads manager. why go to every site for the library or css files you need? simply use the library manager when you make a new html5 app. you will be prompted and given a checklist of what you can download. most packages are available with this tool. need a different version? netbeans allows you to choose the version to download.

5. built in terminal. sometimes you want a linux environment to set commands. netbeans comes with a built-in terminal that allows you to run linux commands. this comes in handy if you are a windows user while needing to use the linux command line. netbeans provides this as a standard part of its array of helpful tools.

do you also want to share your favorite netbeans features with the world? write to netbeans dot webmaster at gmail dot com.