Disabling Text Zoom in Netbeans

A couple of days ago, I upgraded to the most recent version of Netbeans - 7.1.1. I had been running a 7.1-DEV nightly from back in 2011 and just hadn’t bothered to upgrade yet. The first thing I noticed is that this version of Netbeans introduced a “feature” that allows you to zoom in or out of text. This is accomplished by, on the Mac, holding down the Command key and scrolling on the trackpad.

The problem with this is that it is very easy to trigger accidentally - to the point where I was doing it multiple times a day. Even more irritating, there was no indication as to what the zoom level was or easy way to revert to normal view. If you trigger it accidentally, you just have to kinda zoom back out until you find a setting somewhat similar to the rest of your tabs.

Fortunately, someone on the nbusers mailing list mentioned how to solve this problem, so I want to post it here in case anyone else gets as lost and frustrated as I was.

  1. Open the preferences page. On the Mac, you would go Netbeans Menu -> Preferences.

  2. Go to Keymaps.

  3. Search for “zoom”.

  4. Remove the bindings for “Zoom Text In” and “Zoom Text Out.” Double click on the Shortcut and hit backspace twice.

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