As I discussed earlier, I’ve been playing around some with NetBeans 6.5 for PHP IDE. While overall I have liked it a lot, one thing that was holding me back was that it did not seem to be possible to simply open a file for editing unless it was part of a defined project.
I figured it must just be my ignorance, so today I did a little googling and found out that there is a “Favorites” window you can open and use that for “random file access.” To access it, either select the “Window” menu item and then “Favorites” in the drow-down menu, or just type Ctrl+3. This adds the Favorites window in the left pane (at least in my NetBeans configuration).
To add a specific directory as another “favorite” starting point, just right-click in the Favorites window and select the desired directory from the resulting pop-up window.
Hopefully this might help someone else out who finds this as non-intuitive as I did.
Ah, that’s nice to know! Thanks for bringing that up. I too always wondered about that (I’m not entirely keen on putting EVERYTHING into projects [other than complete website projects that is]).
I gravitated to NetBeans 6.5 from Dreamweaver a while ago, as I do find it to be an exceptional IDE over all (packed with lots of features and customizability). But I also found that googling things (much like you did) revealed more about the app than the documentation. I’ll chalk this one up as yet another nice little nugget.
Cheers
Glad it helped you. I’m also glad to see it wasn’t just me who did not find this intuitive.