I always download NetBeans nightlies PHP pack since the beginning of April. However, I couldn’t download them during the last two weeks because of the huge workload that I had. I downloaded the latest NetBeans nightly 201004260200 and noticed that my useful line wrap feature is grayed out. I don’t know why is this feature disabled and since when. After I researched around the Internet, I found this bug report on the NetBeans website. According to one of the comments, the feature was disabled by default since April 13. Based on the bug report, to enable the line wrap feature, you need to edit the netbeans.conf file inside the /etc folder of the NetBeans installation directory, for example, mine is ~/netbeans-dev-201004260200/etc. Then add the line below inside the double quote of the netbeans_default_options variable:

-J-Dorg.netbeans.editor.linewrap=true

The whole line should now be

netbeans_default_options=”-J-client -J-Xss2m -J-Xms32m -J-XX:PermSize=32m -J-XX:MaxPermSize=200m -J-Dnetbeans.logger.console=true -J-ea -J-Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true -J-Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -J-Dorg.netbeans.editor.linewrap=true”

After that, restart the NetBeans IDE and the line wrap feature should enabled by default and set to “Anywhere”. To verify, go to Tools -> Options -> Editor -> Format. You should see Line Wrap option enabled at the bottom .

The bug report stated that it will slow the performance of the application if this feature is enabled by default. In my experience, after enabled this feature by editing the above config file, it actually perform faster than before. I hope that the line wrap feature will be enabled by default in the final release of 6.9 on June 9 because I really like this feature.

You can download NetBeans nightlies at http://bits.netbeans.org/netbeans/trunk/nightly/.