Export Netbeans templates, font colors, and other settings

Once you’ve got your IDE set up just to your liking, it would be painful to start over with default settings.  So what if you switch to a new computer?  You’d want to take all your settings and preferences with you, not attempt to recreate them from scratch.

As far as I know, Netbeans does not have the ability to export / import your custom settings.  That’d be a real handy feature.  But for now we have to get by without it.

I’ve found two posts on the topic:

http://searjeant.blogspot.com/2007/10/migrating-netbeans-settings.html

http://wiki.netbeans.org/TaTCodeTemplateBackup

I will try these, when I get my new laptop set up with Netbeans, and will update this post with a story of success or failure.

UPDATE: I did try this, and it did work.

Here is what worked:

To transfer the settings, I copied the Editors, Preferences, and org-netbeans-api-project-libraries folders located in the .netbeans\6.9\config folder under my Windows user account to the second Netbeans config folder. (Note: I went from Netbeans 6.9 on one computer to Netbeans 7.0 on another.)

I was concerned that because the Netbeans versions were not the same, something would go awry.  But rest assured, nothing blew up.  I imagine certain version combinations may not play nicely together, though.  YMMV.