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A second-hand report says that a user was not able to "discover" the Display As item in the contextual menus of the variables or watch views. Two things that might be done to help address this are: 1) Display As should be put in the main menu. 2) It might be good to put Display As in all the contextual menus there, and where nothing can be changed this would have a submenu with one item that says soemthing like "Normal Display". This would help reduce the impression that the contents of the contextual menu "change" in random situations.
On reflection, doing #2 might be the right thing to do, but this has implications for all the conextual menus in the debugger, and so this needs to be considered more "globally".
To respond to my added comment, if this has implications for the other debugging menus, then they should be changed too (and I'll file issues on those as I find them). I dont think menu items should be so context-sensitive. Our general user data indicates folks are confused by too much context-sensitivity. In any case, I just filed an issue #35533 for #2 here. The first point, that Display As ought to be available in the main menu, remains true.
I do not think that "Display As" should go into the main menu. I do not see a reasonable place for it. Closing as wontfix and leaving issue #35533 to implement...
Verified ... and Closing all issues resolved into NetBeans 6.7 and earlier.