NetBeans 6.8 and Macros

Well, I have been playing with the new release of NetBeans and I must say, I Like It!
It has a lot of useful features that I am really enjoying and find very useful fro productive development.
2 main items being the Macro Recording and the Snippet Palette.

The macros I had a bit of difficulty finding documentation on keywords, which seems to be a common issue.
So here is what I have found out, all shortcut keywords are fair game. List_Of_Shortcuts , at least anything like this adjust-caret-top is for sure.

The keyword Action is usable, eg “caret-forward”.
So say you wanted to end a string with a shortcut to place a semi colon ; at the end of the line.
Here is the macro I use
caret-forward ";" and I set it to a shortcut of Ctrl + ;

So when you have say

right after the s in This you hit Ctrl + ; and it will jump over the last quote mark and add a semicolon

Let’s do something a little more sophisticated like a comment block for a $variable.
Here’s your code


Now you want a decent comment block for that var, here is the Macro


All you need to do is use your Set Shortcut for that Macro on the line before the variable and it will make a comment block that looks like this.

So with this Macro feature you can create all sorts of speedy shortcuts.

As for the Snippet Palette, well just highlight the code and drag & drop it in the category you want and name it. That simple.