Prof. Tim Davis, P.O. Box 116120 University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611-6120 phone (352) 392-1481, fax (352) 392-1220 email: my last name AT cise.ufl.edu

IDEs and editors

I prefer to use the vim editor, and use the command line for everything else. That is, no IDE at all. Feel free to use whatever you want, for example:
• Vim (an editor only)
• Emacs (an editor only)
• Eclipse IDE
• NetBeans IDE
• JCreator IDE (the Lite version is free)
• BlueJ IDE
• 10 Reasons to dump your Java IDE (2002, so it's a bit out of date).

Tabs in IDEs and editors

A note about tabs in a file. If you enter a tab in NotePad in Windows, it moves the cursor 8 spaces. This is also the default for Unix. I prefer to indent 4 spaces, and have my editor (vim) insert spaces when I hit the tab key. This avoids the problem where one editor or IDE adds tabs to a file, and interprets them in a non-standard way (3 for ftjavads, for example, or 4 for Eclipse or JCreator). Then when the code is read in a standard form, it looks very different than the author intented it to look.

I prefer that you configure your IDE or editor to not insert tabs at all, so that when you type a tab, your IDE or editor inserts the correct number of spaces (this is called a soft tab). Set the indentation style to be whatever you like, just tell your IDE or editor to insert the appropriate number of spaces when you hit a tab. To test this, open your *.java file in Windows NotePad. If you have 4-space tabs in your IDE, and the file looks strange in NotePad, then it will look strange to the grader, too (which is not a good thing).

See also: Wikipedia tab key discussion.

Instructions for setting tabs

• For Jcreator:
  • from the menu bar, select Conigure -> Options
  • on the left panel, under Editor, select Java
  • Select "insert spaces" under Tabs, and select appropriate size
• For NetBeans: (to appear)
• For Eclipse:
  • from the menu bar, select Window -> Preferences.
  • Go to the Java -> Code Style -> Formatter page.
  • Click "New" and create a new profile based on the default profile.
  • Slect the profile and click "Edit"
  • Under the Indentation tab, look for "General settings" and change the "Tab policy" to "Spaces only".
  • You can change the "Indentation size" to whatever you want (4 is good; the ftjavads3 code uses 3, however). Use whatever you prefer, just be consistent.
• For vim:
  Right click on this link: .vimrc, and save the .vimrc file in your home directory (on Linux or Unix). For vim on Windows, the same settings will apply, I'm just unsure where the initialization file should go. The relevant settings are:
  set autoindent
  set softtabstop=4
  set shiftwidth=4
  set expandtab