Recently, I wished to be able to pipe a tab I was editing to an executable to format it. Let's say that I have a buffer, and wish to sort it in Linux, using some special options; format it; or use some other filter.  I could open a shell prompt, navigate to the file, and issue a pipe command.  For people who do this frequently, text editors often support an ability to pipe a buffer through an OS command.  On Windows, it might be a command line utility, a Cygwin or GNU command, or another command entirely.  Since Netbeans adheres to a philosophy of not allowing any open buffers that do not have a corresponding disk file, I imagine it would work like this: You select Tools | Pipe Current File To A Command, and it would prompt you with a dialog that has the pathname for the executable, a button to bring up a box to navigate to an executable, and an output filename for the result, with a button with a box to navigate to it.  Automatically overwriting the result might be selectable, or an option.  Then, you just hit "Pipe It" or "Execute" to run the command.  The resulting file would probably open in a new tab afterward.