NetBeans is a free integrated development environment, made primarily for the Java programming language.
The new version of NetBeans 20 has already been released and with it come various changes and improvements, related to support for JDK 21, as well as general bug fixes and more.
For those who are unfamiliar with NetBeans, you should know that this it is quite a popular IDE which provides support for Java SE, Java EE, PHP, C/C++, JavaScript and Groovy programming languages.
Main new features of NetBeans 20
The new version of NetBeans 20 includes updating to JDK 21 "nb-javac" and with it implements code completion compatible with JDK 21, improvements have been made to support for CSS, LSP (Language Server Protocol), VSCode extensions, Rust-related features and inline hints settings have been improved, add keybinds and disable them by default.
In addition to this, it is highlighted that Gradle updated to version 8.4 which includes various fixes such as fixing a stack overflow, removing some missing Gradle configurations, fixing the Gradle version change in wrapper.properties, and fixing LSP/Micronaut tests.
On the part of Maven this was updated to version 3.9.5 along with maven-indexer 7.0.4 and luzene 9.8.0. Updated the JDOM library in maven.embedder from version 1.0 to 2.0.6.1, Implemented improvements to build preparation and reloading, enabled JUnit output processing for failsafe and improved hardcoded maven compiler and resource plugin version defaults.
Regarding PHP, in this new version of NetBeans 20 added support for exception breakpoints, as well as expanded checks when creating breakpoints, fixed gap between checkboxes in php project test settings, fixed issue where typed fields marked as stale are not displayed as stale, improved support for features introduced in new versions of PHP, in the browser, inherited members are displayed in a different color, similar to how it is done in Java, fixed element positioning in code completion settings for php
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Updated jgit from 5.7.0 to 6.7.0
- FlatLaf update from 3.1 to 3.2
- Improved CSS support in NetBeans
- LSP capabilities have been expanded
- The editor supports checkbox changes when previewing Markdown in Markdown format.
- Enabled the option to add a Docker instance via socket on Mac with Apple Silicon
- Correctness checking is enabled and code completion is implemented for XML documents without the SchemaLocation field
- CPPLite stabilized
- Added a profile library for the ARM64 architecture.
- Added nb-javac libwrapper tests.
- Added all business modules with unit tests
- Fix: Java completion parameter tooltip not displayed if previous parameter is TypeVariable
- Added support for string templates
- Update the names of the JavaFX wizards and move the DukeScript wizard to a better position.
Finally if you want to know more about it of this new version, you can check the details in the following link.
How to install Apache NetBeans 20 on Linux?
For those who want to get this new version they must download the application source code, which can be obtained from the following link.
Once you have everything installed then, unzip the newly downloaded file into a directory of your liking.
And from the terminal we are going to enter this directory and then execute:
ant
To build the Apache NetBeans IDE. Once built you can run the IDE by typing
./nbbuild/netbeans/bin/netbeans
As well there are other installation methods with which they can be supported, one of them is with the help of the Snap packages.
They only need to have the support to be able to install these types of packages on their system. To install by this method, you must type the following command:
sudo snap install netbeans --classic
Another method is with the help of Flatpak packages, so you must have the support to install these packages on your system.
The command to perform the installation is as follows:
flatpak install flathub org.apache.netbeans