Search

Dark theme | Light theme

June 10, 2009

Force specific locale when working with NetBeans

To my surprise some messages in the NetBeans 6.7 Release Candidate 2 IDE are translated into Dutch. But I want to use the US English locale, because I am used to the English terms.

We can force NetBeans into using a specific locale. First we must open netbeans.conf in the NETBEANS_INSTALL_DIR/etc directory. Then we look for the key netbeans_default_options. We add the following to the options to force NetBeans into using the US English locale:

-J-Duser.language=en -J-Duser.country=US

One of the blog commenters suggests an even easier method to force a specific locale: use the IDE startup parameter --locale. So if we start NetBeans with the following startup parameter we use the US English locale:

$ netbeans --locale en:US