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NetBeans allows for using project groups in order to (semantically?) manually sort projects. In most cases I use "folder-of-projects" group to group together projects which I usually am dealing with more or less in the same context (i.e. a certain SVN trunk of a larger project consisting of a bunch of, though loosely coupled, maven2 artifacts). So far, I see that I can "open" and "close" projects, with a project being "closed" meaning it disappears altogether from the "Projects" window. Though this generally is reasonable having a bunch of arbitrary projects opened, it seems not that intuitive while dealing with a "folder-of-projects" group which is why I leave projects opened most of the time, resulting in slowing down the IDE at times and eventually having opened way more stuff than actually required. Requested improvement: When using Eclipse, in the "workspace" there is the notion of projects being "opened" (i.e. I can work with them, navigate their content, build them,...) or "closed" (meaning they remain visible in the IDE but I can't interact with them and the IDE does ignore them while cleaning, building, ... unless they're actively "opened" again). In a "folder-of-projects" group, having this notion of "closed" projects that remain visible would somewhat improve usability, maybe extended by the idea to "close" / "open project with dependencies" in order to open/close several projects at once.
It appears quite often that when we work on a project in a project group, we need to get some code from another project in an other project group. This can't be done in NB without switching project group which is clearly a problem of productivity and is not handy. In fact, the "working set" feature in eclipse is what I'd like in NB. A "working set" is a virtual directory that store some projects, but we can see several working sets at once.
semantics of closing/opening projects is different from eclipse. Even a closed project is often known to the IDE and used when reached via some APIs. The possible performance/memory improvement could turn out to be marginal especially if the project is depended upon by an open project. for copying something out of a closed projects, Favourites view can be used or the project in question can be opened. No switching of groups is necessary (that's a costly operation quite often) recently closed projects can be quickly reopened through Recent projects main menu item. closing as wontfix, there's no plan in implementing different open/closed semantics nor a concept of workingset
*** Bug 164154 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Accepted, thanks for clarifying. :)