Netbeans observations/complaints

I have been meaning to do a detailed writeup of my recent use of Netbeans and how I find that it compares with Eclipse, Intellij, and my admitedly limited use of Visual Studio .Net 2005 .... however I have a problem with big posts like that ... they never get done.

So instead, here are a few of my recent observations

• Along with Elcipse ... given that these IDEs are free and have the quality they do is amazing.
• The Netbeans community has produced tons of great walkthroughs and tutorials for how to get up and running with various technologies/languages using Netbeans. Granted most are understandably heavily dependent on using Netbeans, they are full of good general content as well. They are great at giving you a starting point for something new
• The overall user experience is cleaner than Eclipse/IntelliJ for most things. However, this is somewhat due to it lacking features the other two have.
• As a platform for learning Ruby coming from a Java background, its really nice. I love that it comes with Rub support built in with a lot of great features/tutorials/wizards/help. Also, the fact that it leverages JRuby out of the box so that its self contained and doesn't require a ruby installation is a credit to the people working on JRuby.
• Netbeans lacks in the refactoring/editing department when compared to Eclipse and IntelliJ. Not horrible, but not nearly as good.
  
• Built-in support and packaging with Tomcat 6 and Glassfish v2 servers plus its support for JEE 5 specs and tools is great
• The projects view is a nice feature (compared to the files view) which gives you a more logical view of your project independent of where things are on the system ... however its not as customizable as IntelliJ's and I have had numerous re-indexing/refreshing issues where it didn't find new files for a while.
• Netbeans indexes TONS of stuff when it starts up and when you add new files to its workspace ... which means normal work is faster than Eclipse is (or was in the past) but it takes longer than IntelliJ and seemingly reindexes lots of files that haven't changed since I installed them.
• Netbeans has some really nice editors/wizards which include a graphical drag-and-drop interface for creating JSF pages (and Swing forms?).
  
• Evidently there is a bug in Netbean's file search b/c yesterday I tried to case-sensatively search for a particular phrase in my project and the Netbeans file search found 4 results. However there were aprox 6 files with the text. To be fair, I don't know exactly what the problem was and when I did a similar search from Windows .. it found only 2 matches so I am not sure what was going on. But irregardless it should have found them all. (if you did a search in the editor I had open, which was to a file in the same project, it found 2 references in the file, but it wasn't in the results list)

Overall its a very nice IDE with growing support for different languages. Its free which is nicer than IntelliJ's not free and cleaner than Eclipse which is less and less an IDE and more a platform (for better or worse).