A Standalone NetBeans Editor

NetBeans Editor Library is a cool library! Why not (re) use it in your Swing applications?

A great library

NetBeans Standalone Editor

A great library, indeed. Fully conformant with the Swing Text API. Really fast (Elements are lines, not words). With a cool user interface, that surpases JEditorPanes (because it includes line numbers and a status bar). With lots of cool features (antialiasing, variable line separation, tab expansion, macros). And more.

Since I am exploring the NetBeans Platform, I wanted to see if I could reuse this excellent library in my standalone applications. The answer is that yes, I can, using just four jar files from NetBeans 5.5.

Worth the deal?

As I explain in the notes I'm taking to build an IDE for Scheme, using the NetBeans Editor Library in standalone applications is probably not a very good idea. For a simple reason: you'll then be missing all the rest of the NetBeans Platform. Features that affect the editor (there's no code completion in those four jar files, for instance) and for the rest of the Platform (there's no "Find Dialog" either, because that depends on the Dialog Module).

So think of this as a simple exercise to explore the excellent NetBeans Editor Library. And even to easily test your custom editor-related objects.

Enjoy!

So enjoy reading about the standalone editor and even playing with it with this demo (Sun's Java WebStart 5.0+) playing with it] and exploring the [source code for the demo.

Cheers and happy editing, Antonio

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