Quick Tips Archives | Page 2 of 3 | The Electric Toolbox Blog

Netbeans Quick Tip: How to use tabs not spaces

If you are like me and you prefer to have tabs and not spaces for code indentation and are using Netbeans, it uses spaces by default. This quick little post shows how to use tabs instead.

Use tabs not spaces for code indentation in Netbeans

Go to Netbeans -> Preferences -> Editor -> Formatting on aMac
or Tools -> Options -> Editor -> Formattingon Windows

Uncheck the box that says “Expand tabs to spaces”

If you don’t like the default 8 spaces for a tab then change the “Number of spaces per indent” option as well to a more sensible number like 4.

Click “OK” and you are done.

Using find to locate all zero length files

A little while ago I posted how to use the Linux/Unix/OSX find command to locate files bigger or smaller than a particular size but didn’t cover how to find zero length files. This is shown here.

Literal tab character on the command line on Linux BASH

So you need to put a tab on the command line when using BASH on Linux, Mac, BSD? How to do it? The tab character is usually used for command completion etc so typing in a tab won't render one on the command line.

How to refresh the projects file tree in NetBeans

This issue has been bugging me for a while and I just worked out how to solve it: if you’re using NetBeans and add some files to the project outside NetBeans (like copying and pasting in Finder/Explorer) then they don’t show up in the list of files in the projects tree view.

PHP Quick Tip: Check if URL aware fopen wrappers are enabled

PHP supports opening remote URLs (e.g. http://www.example.com/something.htmnl) using the fopen and similar functions. It is possible to disable this function in the PHP configuration so this quick tip shows how to check if it is possible to open remote URLs.

Fix “the operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items” error on OSX

I run my webserver and file server from a virtual machine with the files shared using Samba (yes, now that I’m running on OSX I should really share the files with NFS but that’s for another day). When trying to copy files from the Mac to the Samba share I was getting the error message "The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items".