Working with Netbeans and Eclipse together

I am a huge fan of Eclipse. However, I should be honest in that Netbeans was my first Java IDE and that’s where I learned most of Java from (before college of course). So, it still holds some special place in my heart. What I like about Netbeans is that it makes GUI design in Swing very easy if you know how to do it properly. However, after Netbeans 4.5, I felt it lost some of the focus I wanted for Java and it seemed to make things harder to do that I’d like.  Of course, I was into eclipse already and didn’t see much point in switching to another IDE for the hell of it. Who will memorize all the shortcuts for me?

Now, of course I had this crazy idea to work on IRC again which soon enough turned to cloning a popular chat client. Now, I needed to make some user interfaces. After trying to do it old fashioned way in Eclipse for about an hour, I decided to download Netbeans 6.5.1 and give it a go. What I discovered was that I can import my eclipse projects

from File>Import Project > Eclipse Project

You give the eclipse project location in the workspace and your Netbeans project location

After you work with it for a bit, for example work on making a GUI, you can just right click the project and say resynchronize with Eclipse

You can safely go back to eclipse and work more (after doing refresh in Eclipse of course)

This works both ways.

Enjoy hacking in Java.