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Currently (as of NB 6.1) it is possible to use the "File/OpenFile..." menu or the "Favorites" browser to open and edit files that do not belong to any project, however it is not terribly convenient and we are not providing many important IDE features when editing such files. Now as we are supporting for more and more scripting languages where the concept of project is too heavyweight in many cases we should start treating this scenario as a first-class citizen. This is an umbrella issue for more fine-grained enhancement and bugs that affect the user experience in this area. See also http://wiki.netbeans.org/Preview.jsp?page=EditingFilesOutsideOfProject
The correct link to the wiki is http://wiki.netbeans.org/EditingFilesOutsideOfProject.