Source Editor Tab order in Netbeans 6.5

Question

I recently switched to Netbeans from Eclipse, and the one thing that I liked about Eclipse I'd like to get in Netbeans:

The order of the tabs at the top of the Source Editor in Eclipse seems to be related to most recently used, so if I have a group of 5 files I'm working on at one time, they are all likely to be visible in the tab list, no matter how many tabs I have open.

In Netbeans, this isn't the case - I don't know what the order is, but it isn't useful for switching between my active files quickly - its usually faster to re-open the file to switch to the correct tab than to actually use the tab system.

Is there an option setting or a plugin that can change this behavior to something more like Eclipse?

Answer 1

I don't think it does. However, you can drag the tabs to the positions you want them in. I would suggest just ordering by your liking manually.

Answer 2

By default the tabs in NetBeans are ordered acording to when they were opened. I don't think there's a way how to change it right in NetBeans and don't know about any plugin neither. I think this behaviour is just a matter of taste - I was used to NetBeans behaviour and when I'm using Eclipse, I always get confused about shuffled tabs. But as Kevin said you can drag the tabs to change their order.

When you press CTRL + TAB, the documents in the popup window are ordered acording to last used. This might be usefull for you.

Another (partial) solution might be docking a documents window (Window -> Documents) which contains opened documents and where documents are ordered alphabetically. It's better than re-openenig the files (as you wrote) especially if youre files are spread in different packages and you can't see them in projects/files view on one screen.