As I regularly test different versions of Netbeans as part of the community acceptance program (NetCAT) and for my own fun and benefit I sometimes struggle to start of the right version: Usually the release version is the right one to go. During NetCAT the beta version needs to be tested and when new features are so promising that you want to run the nightly, you go with that.

I came up with a simple solution to never  launch the wrong edition: Differently colored Netbeans icons. This is how my Gnome launcher looks:

netbeans-choose

Easy to tell that red is the nightly, without looking at the icon text! If you want that for yourself, you can get the icons here:

netbeans-dev netbeans-beta

The icons are created using Gimp and just rotating the colors, so it’s a little hacky but does the trick.

In Gnome you can use the application ‚alacarte‘ (or ‚main menu‘ if you run the english locale) to customize your launchers. Just change the icon:

alacarte