This is really short update on OpenFileFast. Recently new JEdit (4.3 final with new ProjectViewer plugin) and Netbeans (6.9RC2) came out and they’ve both changed some APIs. The changes were not backwards compatible and OFF stopped working for them. Fortunately the fix was simple and I’ve prepared updated builds of the plugin for JEdit and NB.

Here are the links for 1.0.1 update:

Netbeans NBM package: off-netbeans-1.0.1.nbm
JEdit jar file: off-jedit-1.0.1.jar

After almost a year of development and several beta versions Open File Fast finally became stable and mature enough to bump its version to 1.0. There’s not much new in this release except several bugfixes and improved look of search results list.

Now it looks like this:

Notice that entered characters are now displayed in bold indicating where they were found in each filename. File path is now right aligned and has lighter color. It doesn’t come into way anymore when looking at results and lets you localize the file you seek even faster.

Netbeans version of plugin was updated to work in Netbeans 6.8, JEdit’s one works now in final JEdit 4.3 version (with ProjecViewer 2.9.1+).

Netbeans NBM package: off-netbeans-1.0.nbm
JEdit jar file: off-jedit-1.0.jar

Here we go again. Open File Fast 0.9.4 has just been released into the wild. And there is big news: with this release I’m introducing Open File Fast for JEdit!

I’ve spent some time refactoring OFF code, extracting search functionality into reusable module and cleaning up here and there. The result is the core functionality is now being used by Netbeans plugin as well as by JEdit plugin. They both share search engine, search dialog and options panel. Thanks to that I’ll be able to release OFF for both platforms at the same time without any additional platform specific work (theoretically of course).

Besides all of above here are the changes for this release:

• underscores at the beginning of filenames are ignored (when searching for _foo.html.erb enter just foo)
• masks in options panel (hide files / move files to bottom of the results) have been changed from regular expression format to wildcard format – just use ‘*’ as replacement for string of any length
• added indexing status indicator to search dialog.

Netbeans NBM package: off-netbeans-0.9.4.nbm
JEdit jar file: off-jedit-0.9.4.jar (requires JEdit 4.3pre16 and ProjectViewer 2.1.3.7)

New version of Open File Fast has arrived.

What’s new?

• Initial project used for search is now Main Project, and if none is selected as main then the first opened project is used
• Ability to switch searched project directly from OFF search dialog (see screenshot below)
• Information about project indexing is shown in dialog’s status bar
• Fixed bug with indexing files in newly added directories
• Improved dialog layout a little

I’ve tested this version under Netbeans 6.5 and 6.7beta and I didn’t notice any problem, however if you encounter some issue let me know.

NBM package: off-netbeans-0.9.3.nbm

Open File Fast has been chosen as “featured” plugin on Netbeans website. Cool! I hope number of plugin users will increase and I will get some more feedback about it.

And as for feedback, I’ve recently heard that OFF has some problems on newest versions of Netbeans (nightly builds and 6.7 beta). Last version which I’ve tested on was 6.7 M2 and then it worked. But as 6.7 final is comming (I hope Sun takeover by Oracle will not delay the release) I will investigate the problems and hopefully resolve them as soon as I will have some free time.

Here is a quick update for Open File Fast plugin.

I’ve noticed (and also got some feedback about it in anouncement comments) that switching projects when OFF is installed is slower than without plugin and Joe Rafaniello who is using it noticed some problems when using OFF with big projects. After a little investigation (with Joe’s help) it appeared that events about project switching which OFF uses for reindexing project files are being sent by Netbeans in the UI thread and this was the cause of the slowdown.

I’ve moved indexing into separate thread and this solved the problem. So here is improved OFF: off-netbeans-0.9.1.nbm.

Textmate has nice feature which is a real timesaver. It’s quick open file dialog. You can type only several characters of filename you are searching for and you get list of all files matching your pattern. When you are looking for FooBar.java you can type fbj and you will find it. It really helps navigating through the project (especially bigger ones).

So… let me introduce my new Netbeans plugin: Open File Fast™. It was inspired by mentioned Textmate’s functionality but has a lot more features. Netbeans already has some Go-To-File dialog but it isn’t too flexible and it requires you to type exact part of file’s name.

Here are the key features of Open File Fast:

• quick finding and opening any file from selected project
• two matching modes:
  • smart (like in Textmate, matching filenames must contain all typed characters, they can be separated by other characters)
  • exact (like Netbeans’ Go-To-File, matching filenames must contain exact phrase)
• matching from start of filename or anywhere in filename
• support for * wildcard in exact mode
• changing minimum entered pattern length needed for searching (default: 3)
• changing delay (time from last keystroke) after which searching starts (default: 300ms)
• optional cleaning of search input field when O-F-F window opens
• hiding files you don’t work on (matching specified regular expresions) from results
• moving less important files (matching specified regular expresions) to the bottom of results list
• results sorted by:
  • file popularity (files opened frequently at the top of list)
  • match accuracy (distance between characters from search phrase in matched filenames)
• opening multiple files at once (selected with ctrl/shift + mouse)

Let’s see how it look in action. Invoke O-F-F from Netbeans’ Navigate menu (I recommend creating a keyboard shortcut for it in Tools/Options/Keymap/Project, I like ctrl+T). For example when you type user you will get following results:

But what if you want to open users_helper.rb file? Just type ush and you will find it!

If you know that something you need is in some javascript file you can show all js files by entering *.js.

When you want to narrow down your search to specific directory just type some parts of directories’ names separated by slashes. For example when looking for files in directory app/models (under project root) type a/m/.

Matching algorithm by default starts searching for pattern at the start of filename, but if you want to search for pattern anywhere in filename (like in Textmate) you can change it in options. Here we are searching for proj and the results list contains also filenames not starting with proj.

Open File Fast can be set up to your own preferences and to match your own workflow. You can configure it under Open File Fast tab in Netbeans’ Miscellaneous options:

Grab it here: off-netbeans-0.9.3.nbm. If you want to help or just look into sources they’re on github .
This is the first public version of this plugin so it could have some bugs, however we’ve been using it for a while now with my workmates and nothing exploded yet :)

Update: for most recent version of plugin go to OFF project page .