Organizing Your Ideas in the Scrapbook

The Scrapbook window is a flexible text editor and test environment within the IDE.   It lets you open and work with text-based files from the file system.  It also lets you create your own notes to yourself, and it provides a test area for Java code fragments.

A Scrapbook page can contain any text you want.  You can open files, copy and paste from other locations inside and outside the IDE, and write Java code or free-form text.   For this reason, it is a good place to keep a to-do list and reminders to yourself, along with ideas for code.  Contents of the pages are saved to files, not to the repository.

Opening the Scrapbook
To open the Scrapbook, select Scrapbook from the Window menu of any IDE window.  Each time you start the Scrapbook, it will have only one blank page, regardless of what files were open when you closed the Scrapbook; you must open files you need again.  For this reason, lock the Scrapbook open during a development session so that you do not inadvertently close it.

Adding and Removing Pages
Using multiple pages in the Scrapbook is a good way to organize your ideas and to provide separate testing contexts for different fragments.

To add an empty page, click the New Page button newpageUp.gif (1063 bytes) on the Scrapbook toolbar.  To remove a page, select its tab, and then click the Delete Page button delpageUp.gif (1092 bytes).  You cannot delete a page if it is the only one left.

Opening a File
To open a text-based file in the file system, select Open from the File menu, or use the shortcut key Ctrl+O.  This creates a new Scrapbook page that contains the specified file. The title of the page is the name of the file. 

You can edit this file and save your changes back to the file system by selecting Save from the File menu.  When you are finished with the file, delete its page from the Scrapbook.  Removing the page that contains a file does not delete the file from the file system;  it removes it from the workspace. 

ngrelc.gif (533 bytes)
The Scrapbook
Workspace

ngrelt.gif (466 bytes)
Experimenting with Code Fragments
Locking Windows Open