This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
In the current design, the prop sheet in the Form Editor is not dedicated to the Form Editor. The contents reflect the selected node. This causes a few problems: *When one is working in the Form Editor, they probably do not want to get properties on other sorts of objects. *Reusing the standard prop sheet means that the title bar has to be used, which is a waste of screen real estate. *"Properties" overload. The title bar has the name Properties, plus there is a tab named Properties, plus there are categories named Properties and Other Properties. This makes it very awkward to document tasks. I suggest having the properties simply be part of the Inspector without the Properties titlebar. If somebody choose Window | Properties, the Prop Window would open up in a separate window or on a tab of an existing window
I also noticed the problems with the common property sheet. What you propose is actually a step back to what we had in NB 3.5. The changes were made as part of window system redesign and property sheet rewrite. It's up to HIE to decide about this.
There are also other problems related to the global properties window, e.g. with proper node selection/activation (context actions dependent on selected node might have problems - like in issue 52188). Overall, the global property sheet is more error prone. Unless there is a good reason why the properties should be global for the whole IDE when a form is opened, I suggest to make the property sheet dedicated for the form editor only. Then the question is whether the property sheet should be placed together with the inspector in one window, or whether it should be a separate window.