Template Manager
"Brett Ryan" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.java.netbeans.user-interface |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi, I'm wondering if I could suggest an improvement to the Template Manager
within netbeans.
My suggestion has two parts
1). Improve the usability of the template manager
Currently this dialog is simply a tree of available templates grouped by
topic; This is excelent for finding a template, though it's a real pain to
actually edit the templates; you first need to open it, edit it save it then
open the dialog again for the next template. My suggestion for this dialog
is to include an inline editor to allow the user to simply
edit/save/revert-default a template. A simple version of the screen could be
represented as follows:
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Add | New Folder | Duplicate | Rename | Move Up | Move Down | Delete |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Templates |
|+--------------------------------------------------------------------+|
|| + Web ||
|| + Enterprise ||
|| + Java Classes ||
|| - Java Class ||
|| - Empty Java File ||
|| - Java Interface ||
|| - Java Enum ||
|| ... ||
|+--------------------------------------------------------------------+|
|+--------------------------------------------------------------------+|
|| ||
|| ||
|| ||
|| { Inline preview of selected template above } ||
|| ||
|| ||
|| { Allow user to edit directly } ||
|| ||
|| ||
|| ||
|| ||
|+--------------------------------------------------------------------+|
|[Save] [Revert] [Close] ||
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
2). Handle templates more dynamically.
When creating templates I find that a lot of the components that build up
templates are replicated, for example a java exception template should
inherit the template from a java class; only adding to the body of the
class. I'm seeing what looks to be great support in 6.0 M9 for more flexible
templates and am hoping templates might become a little more dynamic.
Once I install a new version one of the first things I do is go through all
the templates and alter them, adding a __LICENCE__ tag at the top of each
file and a string table entry to match it. This task is quite time consuming
and even though I shouldn't be doing it often, it would be cool to have
something like the above.