Editor Task View

To show the editor task list window, click this icon in the tasklist toolbar:

The source editor list automatically scans the currently open document in the editor and adds an entry in the tasklist for every "task" it discovers in the source code.

A task is an occurrence of one of the following strings:

Note that the above strings are case sensitive. The exact list of strings is actually a regular expression, and it can be customized as you please.

Thus, if you have a source file like the following:

 /** This method does nothing interesting
     @todo Add something interesting here
  */
  public void doSomethingInteresting() {
      int x = 42; // TODO Rethink this part
  }
the tasklist will add two tasks to the editor task list:

You can decide if you want the tasklist to include or exclude occurrences of the above task strings that appear outside of comment sections. Comment sections are recognized for a fixed set of file types, currently including Java, C/C++, and HTML.

The editor scanner will also check your source file headers for aged copyrights. If it discovers a copyright which does not include the current year, it will add a task which offers to update the copyright to include the current year. For example, if you have a line like this:

   // Copyright 1999 by Yoyodyne
the tasklist will get a task like this: It also changes date ranges or adds to comma separated year lists. You can then right click on this task and select "Auto Fix". That will perform the edit on your document such that the copyright is up to date.

You can turn off these scanning features, or change the scanning delay, as described in the Task List Options document.

You can customize which task properties are shown in the editor task list, change the sorting order, etc. See the Using the Table document for details on how to do that.


Comments & requests to dev@tasklist.netbeans.org. Further information at tasklist.netbeans.org.