The screwdriver is back!

For a while we had overrides/implements icons which were green "O"s and 
"I"s, which was easy enough to remember, if not very elegant. Now we are 
back to a cleaned-up version of the 5.x icons.

http://deadlock.nbextras.org/fisheye/changelog/netbeans/java/editor?cs=MAIN:phrebejk:20070221161628

Why the screwdriver, or whatever it is?

For that matter, why do we need two different icons? IMHO we could just 
use the "overrides" icon. All I usually care about is knowing that this 
method's signature is constrained by some supertype, i.e. that the 
@Override annotation could be used. The details are available in the 
tooltip if you care anyway.

More radical idea: get rid of the override/implements annotations 
completely for 1.5+ sources. Instead, add an editor hint to add 
@Override to any method which could use it but does not currently have 
it. (Jackpot has a transformer like this too.) I would actually find 
this more valuable - @Override helps prevent stupid mistakes when 
editing supertypes (just as C#'s language keyword does), and once your 
code is fully @Override-annotated, you won't need to see the distracting 
editor glyph icons any more. "Go to Super Implementation" would then 
take care of the navigation aspect of the current annotations. (Assuming 
it actually worked - currently it doesn't.)

-J.

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