Berry Langerak

I’m a VIM kinda guy. I like love VIM for everything it is. I write e-mails in VIM, I write presentations and blogposts in VIM, I write todo-lists in VIM and I also write my software using VIM. VIM does have downsides in that respect though, and those downsides are well-known. For starters, VIM doesn’t have smart, context-aware auto-completion. I write a heck of a lot of classes and interfaces, and it’s not always easy to keep track of the names of classes and methods. I’ve always lived with that, as VIM has a lot of upsides as well: I can write and manipulate text in VIM faster than most people can manipulate text in any other editor I’ve seen. It’s also highly customizable, so if there’s anything VIM doesn’t do, I make it do that anyway.

Netbeans is a new kid in town of IDE’s suitable for PHP. In the past, I’ve used Eclipse for PHP development, but that always felt slow and too big for writing PHP. I’ve used the first beta of Netbeans for PHP, but that had issues with quotes, linefeeds and other stuff so I ditched it within half an hour. It seems that Netbeans got a lot better since that first beta, so I figured I should give it another try to see if it can fulfill my (absurdly high) demands when it comes to writing code. I had to install it first, obviously.

Installing Netbeans on Ubuntu really is easy enough, if you have an understanding of how Ubuntu works. For the people who don’t, I’ve kept a short log of how I’ve installed it, hopefully someone will benefit from this. There are a few different methods of installing Netbeans in Ubuntu, which all have there up- and downsides. The way of installing I chose has the downside of being slightly more complex, but you get the last version anyway.

The first, and probably easiest way of installing Netbeans on Ubuntu, is to download and install the Java JDK and Netbeans bundle. To be fair, I’ve never tried it and it seems easy enough, but I’m not sure if you’ll always have the latest version of Netbeans in the bundle. At this time, it seems it does indeed include the latest version.

The second easy way to install Netbeans, is using Ubuntu’s software distribution: simply typing “sudo apt-get install netbeans-ide” will install Netbeans, including all of it’s dependencies. Again, there is the downside that you may not have the most current version in the distribution channels.

The third way, slightly more complicated, ensures you have the latest version of Netbeans installed. Open a terminal and type “which java”. If the command returns a response, you have Java, so you can skip the following. If it doesn’t return anything, Java SDK is not installed on your system, so you have to install it. Luckily, that is easy enough: type “sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jdk”, and agree to the license. To prepare you: the download is 160Mb, but that shouldn’t be a problem in this day and age.

After installing Java, it’s time to download the Netbeans installer from the Netbeans download page. I write PHP mostly, so the PHP version seems to be the most decent option. Start the download and save it to a location of your choice. If you’re done downloading, go back to the terminal and cd into the directory you’ve just saved the installer to. Execute the following commands, and enjoy while Netbeans presents you with an installation wizard:

chmod +x netbeans* && ./netbeans-*

That’s it, you’re done. Netbeans should now have an icon on your desktop. Start the application, and start writing code. I’ll give Netbeans an honest chance for about a month and will give an update of it later. Obviously, I won’t abandon VIM for anything but writing code.