Netbeans and switching branches

[tominf]

Hi everyone,
I'm working on a large project and often end up in a situation, when I need to switch from a long term development branch to a bug fix branch where I just spend a few minutes or hours and then switch back and continue development. But because of this short switch many of my open files are closed in Netbeans because they don't exist in the bug fix branch yet. What's the best way to deal with this?

When I close Netbeans, the list of my open projects and files is saved somewhere (some restore point) so the next time I start Netbeans, it reopens them all again. Is there some possibility to give this restore point a name? That way I could have multiple restore points and could switch between them as needed.

Thanks for any advice!

[wumpz]

My solution for this problem is: I use two cloned directories and two Netbeans Project Groups: one for master / hotfix / bugfix - branches and one for develop branch).
Project Group switching in Netbeans is way faster then branch switching + recompile.

Pro:

• open files are stored per project group

Con:

• two project directories for large projects (double the size)

[wumpz]

Sorry, I have no idea. To be honest, I always thought, the open files list is reopened in the same ordering on choosing a project group.

[mbien]

NB has another feature: document groups. However, it doesn't seem to work very well together with project groups and would likely need some updates. The UX while switching doc groups is also.. a bit unusual. Didn't have time to look into this so far.

Opening several clones of the same project multiple times is neat trick though! You will also have far less scanning-for-changes while switching branches that way.

[Chris2011]

I know that VS Code still hold the files open even if they are not exist anymore, but as fas as I know they also "save" the work, even when the file is unsaved. It will be still part of the temp file I guess so it exists somewhere. I also thought about this stuff but also no time to had a look into it.

[wumpz]

@mbien I used document groups. There are two problems I see: synchronizing with project groups and doc group dialog is modal, cannot be docked.

[mbien]

I have this in my notes under "salvage document groups":

• <none> dg should not close files (alternative: introduce special <don't-track> group)
• pg switch should switch to <none> dg
• switch from <none> to anything else should automatically create a dg for the file list of the active pg
• ..

but there are probably more edge cases to solve to make pg and dg play well together