After struggling with IDEA on-and-off for several months, I installed NetBeans 12.6 in February and soon made it my main development environment. I’m just now starting to get used to it.
I see that NetBeans 13 was released on 4 March. Has anyone here tried it? Any observations/advice/opinions?
I’ve been using NB 13. It is pretty much the same than the 12.0 & 12.6 I upgraded from 
Seems that they put the theme I was already using as a default, which is nice. And new tooling versions support. But really, it is the same. I haven’t observed any bugs yet.
Which issue(s) made you switch back to Netbeans? Or has Netbeans improved this much?
Just made the switch to NB13 as well. No complaints, yet.
I can’t point to any definite issues with IDEA.
As a long-time JMonkeyEngine SDK user, I’m accustomed to the NetBeans ways of doing things. At this point, I’m unwilling to invest the time to become proficient in IDEA and configure it to my taste. For instance, I haven’t learned any IDEA shortcut keys—I know they exist, but I still think in terms of NetBeans shortcuts. I never disabled the pointless warnings that IDEA generates. I’ve never opened 2 IDEA projects at the same time. And I haven’t figured out how to edit 2 files side-by-side or open 2 windows into the same file.
The thing I like best about IDEA is its spellchecker. I also like being able to commit portions of a file without committing all the changes.
I’m not 100% satisfied with NetBeans 12.6 either. It does things in the background without notifying me, expands my Project and File views unexpectedly, and flags non-existent build errors. Also, I find its source-inspection tool useless.
So I think I’m ready to upgrade…
I will say, I was a long time NetBeans user, but after Apache took over NetBeans and we went though several releases that did not work (9 & 10). I moved to IDEA. It was a learning curve, but in under 6 months I was much more productive in it than I ever was in NetBeans. Now I own an all products jetbrains license and have moved all my development to their IDEs. The best thing for myself is I can use CLion for C/C++, Rider for C#, IDEA for Java and they all work the same so I do not need to know how to use 3 different tools anymore.
Big things that make a difference to me for my Java work:
Just my two cents.
Thanks!
I’m same to you, was using Netbeans as my first ide, but after apache it wasn’t a good option for me anymore so i moved to idea, at first it was a bit hard! but when get used to it found out it is way better than netbeans, and also i started to use Clion too and it is a top choice for c/c++ (also i use geany for c++ it is good choice for lighweight handy code editor)
*For shortcuts simply go to settings and change your keymap to netbeans after it you no need to learn new keymaping like if you want to reformat code you simply do it in idea as you do in netbeans with Alt+Shift+F
*you have fernflower it is really good thing that developed under idea, it is a console tool that you give it jar class files and get java files back! fernflower is really good decompiler.
*i develop playframework and some jakartaee apps with idea, it is best ide for playframework!
Despite all the different IDEs I use (all version control capable), I still use GitKraken (preferred, the free edition works just fine) or SourceTree (work) to manage my push & pull game. They allow easily to cherry pick chunks/lines to commit. I can’t even remember when I last used some IDE to commit code. And I actually do like how Netbeans shows the version control changes and lets me instantly peek/revert to previous version just hovering on the gutter. Way better than Visual Studio for example.
Don’t confuse the jME SDK source inspection with Netbeans one 
But I do agree that Netbeans really chose poorly here. Eclipse had way better eons ago already. With Netbeans it is really hard to code source inspection that is actually smart. Almost impossible. So they only have these really simple things there.
I asked for opinions, and I got 'em. But nothing engages community interest like a poll…
When developing with/for JMonkeyEngine, which environment do you prefer?
0 voters
Android Studio is a modified intellij IDEA with android tools, you can still do all the things you do on IDEA with added android benefits like emulators/profiling/jni editor/xml layout viewer, i prefer android studio when coding a crossplatform game or when working on jme3 android, but when testing something on raspberry pi, i prefer command line tools (with a shell script).
I just wanted to share a hair raising experience this morning. I was trying to find why some JNI native builds started breaking on a local branch I was working on, and found that some submodule header files were empty. I did a git reset --hard inside the submodule only to find that the .git folder in the submodule was gone and I had just reset all my work for the last couple days.
Thankfully IDEA had a feature that I had no idea about: Local History ( Local History | IntelliJ IDEA (jetbrains.com)). I was unable to undo the git reset and keep working. One of the many amazing features that has saved me many hours of work.
Cool!
Note for those that may not have IDEA: git does keep orphaned commits in the reflog for 90 days, so there are other recovery options.
That is good to know, I was not aware of that.
Past polls, for comparison:
I sure miss those days, when you could post a poll and get 94 participants!
Also Netbeans has a local history. Most IDEs do, keep that in mind when code is lost! Don’t panic!
IDEA does seem to gain some traction. Comparing to those old polls. Which is not a surprise as it does so outside jME too.
I know this is not belong to here, but why not we go with gradle and project maker jar like libgdx, and also use custom tool for viewing model or scene and … separately but optimized for jmonkeyenigne, rather than put it in a ide like intellij or netbeans same as hyperlap or particle editor.
gradle can be very helpful like having numerous goals for build and run on different platforms, i still can’t see my game in android with sdk i have just linux and pc to port. also i can’t use other sdk functionalities on linux opensuse. this way of having gradle project and a separate ide independent tool will make users free of using netbeans sdk they can use any ide also have the tool to see terrain, models, and …
A newbee’s opinion:
I was using JMonkeyEngine SDK until I found some difficulties of developing mobile applications. For me, JMonkeyEngine SDK is much better than other tools for we have so many “native” addons. Currently I’m useing Android Studio BUT if our SDK solved the APK deployment problem I’ll instantly switch back to JMonkeyEngine SDK.
There has been a lot of attempts during the years. Nothing just get finalized. One man projects. Surprisingly large undertaking for someone to use their free time to. No one objects this approach I’m sure.
And the engine has tried to advertise its IDE independent nature during the years. Like providing the Gradle template and removing SDK from the instructions.
With the flood gates on “justify why your favourite IDE is better” having been opened.
The 2 features that I think set intelliJ apart are:
Thats me creating a modified setter, and intellij seems to realise that and that there is a member in the class called rotationalVelocity_world already and its type is RotationalVelocity so it suggests that as an autocomplete. Most IDEs seem to autocomplete “after the dot” and just do a “this variable starts with the already typed information” approach whereas intelliJ takes the types of the expected thing into account as well
While an application is executing you can stop at a breakpoint and execute whatever code you want, either to see the result or to mutate the applications state at run time. Its a little like hotswap but easier and you can do it in contexts where you don’t have the source (e.g. a debug point in a library you are using)
Now where’s my referral cheque from Jetbrains?
