NetBeans Edit Externally

Table of Contents

• About
• Usage
• Configuration
  • Placeholders
  • Quoting and Escaping
  • Examples
  • Keybindings
• Known Issues
• Related plugins
• License

NetBeans Edit Externally

Allows opening the currently edited file in an external editor.

About

Its main purpose is to open the currently edited file at the exact same cursor position as in NetBeans to execute some complex editing action that is not easily possible within NetBeans itself.

The command to open the file in an external editor must be supplied by the user and allows placeholders to specify the location of the cursor to be able to jump to the same location of the cursor in NetBeans' editor.

A fallback command can be specified for opening a file for which no editor window is open. This command doesn’t support all the placeholders, but allows editing a file directly from the Projects nodes.

Since version 2.0.0 this plugin also exposes values related to selected text. This can be used to preselect the same text in the external editor if that editor supports such a use case.

Usage

This plugin adds an entry Edit Externally to the following menus:

• Main Menu Tools

• Context Menu of each editor window

• Submenu Tools in the context popup menu of each node in the Projects view

Additionally an icon is placed in the File section of the main toolbar and into the editor’s toolbar:

Configuration

The configuration panel can be found at Tools / Options / Miscellaneous / Edit Externally.

There are two commands to be configured:

• Edit externally

• Open externally

This plugin decides which one to call based on the information it has about the currently selected file. If an open editor for the file is found, the Edit externally action is called as it allows including cursor location information in the command.

If no associated editor is found, the Open externally action is called instead.

Placeholders

The following placeholders can be used for both commands:

${file}	The absolute path to the file.
${fileName}	The file name of the file.
${fileBasename}	The file name of the file without extension.
${fileExt}	The file extension of the file.

These values always refer to the currently selected file in the editor window or, when using the context menu entry in the navigation tree, the file selected in the tree.

The following placeholders can additionally be used for the Edit externally action:

${line0}	The line of the cursor location (0-based).
${line}	The line of the cursor location (1-based).
${column0}	The column of the cursor location (0-based).
${column}	The column of the cursor location (1-based).
${selectedText}	The currently selected text or an empty string if no text is selected.
${selectionStart0}	The location of the first character of a selection (number of chars in the file, 0-based) or -1 if no text is selected.
${selectionStart}	The location of the first character of a selection (number of chars in the file, 1-based) or -1 if no text is selected.
${selectionEnd0}	The location of the last character of a selection (number of chars in the file, 0-based) or -1 if no text is selected.
${selectionEnd}	The location of the last character of a selection (number of chars in the file, 1-based) or -1 if no text is selected.
${selectionEndExclusive0}	The location of the first character after the selection (number of chars in the file, 0-based) or -1 if no text is selected.
${selectionEndExclusive}	The location of the first character after the selection (number of chars in the file, 1-based) or -1 if no text is selected.

All numeric values are provided in two different flavours, 0-based and 1-based. Use the one more appropriate for your use case. It makes the code more readable than having to add or subtract 1 from its values.

The line and column placeholders are always filled (if there is an open editor window for the corresponding file) as the cursor will always be on a certain position in the file.\ All the remaining placeholders (related to text selection) are only filled if there actually is selected text. If not, ${selectedText} will be an empty string; all the others will have the value -1.

The end of the selection is also available in an inclusive and an exclusive form. The inclusive form specifies the cursor position of the last selected character. For a single selected character it would be the same value as the start of the selection. The exclusive form specifies the character position after the last selected character. For a single selected character it would be the start of the selection + 1.

Quoting and Escaping

To allow command line arguments with spaces they can be enclosed within single or double quotes. It is also possible to escape a single space or quote character by preceding it with a backslash.

Backslashes take precedence over quotes. Therefore it is possible to have quotes as part of a quoted string like in this example ^[1]:

myprogram 'my \'quoted\' string'

It is also possible to escape placeholders with a backslash to include them literally and prevent them from being expanded:

myprogram literal \${file}

Examples

To call vim in an urxvt terminal the following configuration can be used:

Edit externally

urxvt -e vim ${file} "+call cursor(${line}, ${column})"

Open externally

urxvt -e vim ${file}

More examples can be found in the Wiki.

The Wiki is made for collaboration. Please add more examples for other editors or provide additional tricks on how to utilize this plugin the best.

Keybindings

This plugin registers an action with the name "Edit Externally" in NetBeans. It is recommended to provide a custom keybinding for that action for faster access.

Known Issues

• Multiple selected files are not supported at the moment.

  If multiple files are selected in the Node tree, only one of them will get opened in the configured editor.

Related plugins

This plugin is inspired by the following existing plugins.

QuickOpener

https://github.com/Chris2011/QuickOpener-NetBeans

This plugin shares some of the same ideas and does provide some additional actions. Unfortunately it is quite buggy and not very handy.

Use System Desktop

https://github.com/manikantannaren/mynetbeans/tree/master/NB-Use-System-Desktop

This plugin provides actions to open the currently selected file via the operating system’s default application. It lacks the ability to jump to a specific cursor location, but may be used together with Edit Externally.

License

This plugin is licensed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.

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1. In that exact example it would be easier and more readable to instead alternate single and double quotes: myprogram 'my "quoted" string'