The recent release of Netbeans 6.8 changed the default behavior of the editor to indicate that a file had changed and was unsaved. Instead of indicating changed and unsaved files with an asterisk (pretty common in most IDEs and editors) the file name is emboldened. I’m all in favour of a bit of change and to be honest it would have maybe taken me a day to get used to it but to me it was just a bit too subtle. In order to revert to the old behavior you need to start Netbeans with the option -J-Dnb.tabnames.html=false.

To do this on a Mac go to the package in the Applications Folder or wherever you installed it. Select Open in Finder. Ctrl Click to bring up the menu and select show package contents. This should bring up a new Finder window with a folder called Contents in. I then needed to edit the file Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/netbeans.conf and change the line containing netbeans_default_options=” … to include -J-Dnb.tabnames.html=false .