Netbeans Regular Expressions Find and Replace

Powerful find and replace with regular expressions should be the hallmark of every IDE worth its mettle. MS Visual Studio does it so-so, but lo and behold, Netbeans (at least in version 6.1) is even worse.

So I wanted to put foo at the beginning of every line in a text, which calls for a regex like:

^.*

and replace like:

foo $0

However, Netbeans only ever replaces the first match in a text, over and over again. It also hangs up easily in the process.

As with many a Netbeans quirk, it’s Quanta Plus to the rescue again:

Works like a charm.

Posted: 22 January 2009