The Smallest Things

I've been playing a little with Textmate, a Mac-only text editor, that all the Ruby types seem to use, and a little with Netbeans, which seems like the equivalent of Eclipse. I think I would use Netbeans if only because it's free if it could do just one thing, and it seems utterly trivial, and yet I seem to care about it a lot.

Get the fonts and colors right.

In other words, either mimic the Textmate colors settings (and behind the scenes, translate it to Netbeans-speak), or take the themes used by Textmate and be able to apply it to Netbeans. Already, there appears to be some concessions to making Textmate people happy.

Right now, Netbeans has this utterly painful way to set fonts and colors. First, if I select Ruby (and they provide sample code), I can't click on the Ruby element and edit that. I should be able to click in the comment area, and Netbeans should say "Oh yes, that's a comment, and I apply this rule!"). Instead, I have to hunt-and-peck and hope I can find a corresponding element to adjust its color.

I was trying to find how to set the color of def-end. Absolutely NONE of the choices in the Ruby configurations would let me do this.

None.

Instead, I had to go to general settings, and find it there.

Wow, that is incredibly painful.

Guys, I know you have tons of useful features, stuff that Textmate doesn't even seem to be close to handling. And, yet, if you could get the tiny superficial things right, namely, the fonts, the colors, that would, I tell you, go a long way to getting people to try it out.

Silly? Yes. Trivial? Yes.

But do it.