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I would like to request that autocompletion for local variables be added to the IDE. I am not aware of ANY IDE that does NOT let you complete local variables except for NetBeans. I'm not sure how the lack of this has lasted so long except for the fact that people might just be used to it. Also, CTRL-L/K doesn't count, that's more of a Emacs text-complete feature than it is an IDE feature. Can someone shed some light as to why this doesn't exist and how its gone so long without being implemented? I see the roadmap for 3.6 and 4.0, and while I see a lot of IDE features, I don't see almost any editing-specific features which is 90% of the work a person does with an IDE.
Can anyone provide an evaluation of this request and I'm most curious why this was never added and how its gone so long without anyone noticing its missing... seriously, even JEdit's Java plugin offers local code completion. Does this require fundamental architecture changes?
I received a request for this functionality on a local mailing list (nbdiscuss_ru@netbeans.org) from Sergey Kholobuda. May I request a review of this rather useful and fundamental coding-productivity functionality, please, why it's not there, and how Java-MDR (in 4.0) may solve this issue?
Maxym, Are you addressing these questions to me? I have no idea why its not there... as I mentioned in my original post, every other IDE and even text editor that supports completion has this functionality and I can't figure out for the life of my how it was overlooked. The more I use NetBeans the more it is making me crazy manually typing out my damn local variables. Think about it, probably more than 1/2 of the variables programmers work with are created within the score of a method or constructor. Giving the current functionality with NetBeans, its simply not possible to complete these variables which effectively defeats one of the fundamentally most important features of an IDE: autocomplete. Also as far as the reality of this, I believe it encourages people to type shorter and less readable variable names just because of the lack of autocomplete. Take the example: Date dateFirstUserJoined = getSystemStartDate(); now lets say my method is 50 lines long, and it calls 3 or 4 other methods with the same variable... you get the idea... I'm not going to type that variable over and over and over again. So instead I might name it: Date dfj = getSystemStartDate(); which helps me not type, but makes my code useless to someone else and probably myself after not looking at the code for a few weeks then trying to remember what those names were. I imagine the lack of this functionality stems from short commings in the autocomplete parser. Autocomplete accuracy, delay and intelligence in NetBeans 3.5.1 acts like a proof of concept when compared to the likes of Eclipse 3.x (and 2.x sort of) or IntelliJ 3.x/4.x. Clearly this release is very old, but after trying the 3.6 beta release and 4.0 dev stream for a week, I see absolutely no improvements... it still behaves the same. This bug/enhancement/whatever frustrates me so much because autocomplete and syntax highlighting are some of the #1 core functionalities that most all IDEs need and are based around. Without them, or with weak implementations of them you just drive the programmers crazy trying to work around the short commings. Clearly this isn't your fault, I'm sorry for the accusatory tone; its intended at whoever decided things to be the way they are currently.
Not to you, Ryiad, rather to module owners. I also have absolutely no idea why this feature isn't there, but I'm not the one to answer, as I'm no expert in NB, what I aksed was just a translation of Serg Kholobuda's question, that's all
Closing as duplicate. I copy/pasted all relevant info and add you on CC list. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 18888 ***