I believe this is intentional - to avoid confusion and overlap with Projects, we try to make the Files tab just be a folder tree without added decoration (except for the labels of the top-level nodes). Ondrej might have some comment; I don't have much personal opinion either way.

I don't like the intentional design :-). To me, it makes sense not to have to go to the open project dialog to open a project in a tree. The projects in a sub-tree may not be dependencies, and they may just be related to some overall system. Pieces which are plugged in dynamically and yet standalone. Jini services perhaps. Too, the action to open the project is on the Node, and that is good. To me it is about usability, and doesn't confuse things. It seems more confusing that it is a project the IDE can open and it doesn't tell the user that is the case. 

I would *really* love to have this, but I understand if we can't. Just voicing my opinion because I use this quite often; nearly daily. I have some projects which use other projects for testing things. For instance, I have some subprojects which are used to do nothing more than load some files from other projects into a web browser (JavaScript in Selenium) through an active session. This allows me to debug those things in JS more easily and test them by driving the browser context with my hands and then testing logic as I need right there in place without having tests or other logic get to that state for me. I can then work on the code until I get it just the way I want it. Those projects are just related and in no way a dependency, but I like to keep them under the tree because they are only related to the tree which they reside.

Thanks much.

I vote to keep things as they are. I see the 'Files' tab as something as close to a file manager as possible.

I want it to be fast and not waste too much time preprocessing the file hierarchy in order to produce pretty icons.

More to the point, I don't want the true project nodes such as the ones for Maven projects for example -- because each node means the IDE would need to read the pom.xml, parse it, etc. and waste a lot of time.

Actually, there might be 2 kinds of 'project nodes' the way I see it. One is the project node with the parsed title and custom icon as seen in the 'Projects' tab or the project node shown in the File|Open Project window which is just a custom icon with the normal file name. The 2nd one might be tolerable with regard to speed.

My understanding is those things are already taking place. There is a shared model being used in this case. I'll look at the file tab support to double check, but the nodes there already know it is a project folder as I can right click on it and choose to "Open Project". I just have no visual cue there to make it jump out at me more easily.

Too, as it relates to files, I can perform all the same actions with the nodes in the files tab; which makes sense. That is how one can see everything under the project view such as extra Ant scripts etc. Were that to change, then NB would become pretty useless as an IDE because then only files the project knows it should display would be usable versus those it knows how to work with and can be seen in the files tab.

Showing a basic icon (as in Open Project) should be possible with no significant effect on performance. The question is whether this is desirable for all users or whether it would be likely to confuse some, especially those for whom the distinction between the Projects and Files tabs may already be murky. A matter for the UI spec.

Ondrej probably is not going to have time to look at this. I am implementing it as an experimental feature for 7.0 in the hope that its usefulness will outweigh the risk of confusion over the function of the Files tab (where we normally do not display project icons or other project-type-specific UI) and the risk of any performance regression.

1. Only subnodes will show the icons, not the root nodes of the open projects themselves. This minimizes the visibility of the change to the cases where the icon is really useful.

2. To avoid performance impacts, only the basic icon (as in the Open Project dialog) is shown, not the detailed icon. For example, all dirs with ./pom.xml will show a generic Maven icon; the IDE does not take the time to parse the POM and find the packaging.

3. The project display name is shown as the tooltip. This does require loading the project, but only happens if you actually hover over the node, not just because the parent dir was expanded.

core-main #57498e22e5fc

Awesome. Thanks Jesse. I look forward to using it.

(In reply to comment #7)
> The project display name is shown as the tooltip.

anebuzelsky expressed concern about this. I don't _think_ this will be a problem in practice but if anyone notices e.g. a lot of disk activity or lagginess occurring when moving the mouse across a folder list, this can be commented out without affecting the icon part of the fix.

Shouldn't this whole feature be configurable via some system property or MBean ?

(In reply to comment #10)
> Shouldn't this whole feature be configurable

We do not generally expose a configuration option unless it is clear that the feature is really needed by some large subset of users, and really harmful to some other large subset of users, and there is no straightforward way to reconcile those demands short of forcing each user to decide.

Integrated into 'main-golden', will be available in build *201101270001* on http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/nightly/ (upload may still be in progress)
Changeset: http://hg.netbeans.org/main/rev/57498e22e5fc
User: Jesse Glick <jglick@netbeans.org>
Log: #194068: display basic icon for subproject folders.

Integrated into 'main-golden', will be available in build *201101271430* on http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/nightly/ (upload may still be in progress)
Changeset: http://hg.netbeans.org/main/rev/57498e22e5fc
User: Jesse Glick <jglick@netbeans.org>
Log: #194068: display basic icon for subproject folders.

Integrated into 'main-golden', will be available in build *201102160501* on http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/nightly/ (upload may still be in progress)
Changeset: http://hg.netbeans.org/main/rev/fecf4b4bd71b
User: Jesse Glick <jglick@netbeans.org>
Log: #194068 fix mistakenly added expand handles to simple file nodes that should have had none.