as a whole MPLABX is very buggy and a lot of the issues arise directly from the core netbeans backend.
Is that based on your personal experience, or hearsay? With MPLABX, or other NetBeans IDEs?
My own experience and opinion of using MPLAB X with PIC32s is that it's both buggy and kind of terrible as an IDE in general. It has a tendency of locking up either permanently or for extended periods (ie. several minutes) when debugging, especially if you try inspecting variables.
I haven't used other versions of NetBeans so I can't tell what's Microchip's customizations and what's not, but there's also some completely unnecessary idiot-proofing that just gets in your way. For example, if you try to rename a source file the IDE does not allow you to change the extension (to get preprocessing for some assembly source files I had to change the extension from .s to .S, a trivial task that could not be done within the IDE). I also hugely dislike the insistence on collecting all your projects ever within a single instance. Since you inevitably end up with similar files in separate, unrelated projects, you always have to be very careful that you're editing the correct one. Most IDEs allow you collect related projects into a single workspace, but MPLAB X is the only one I know that forces this. And if you want to open a second IDE instance you have to do it from the command line with some special parameters to override the single-instance behaviour. I also just plain don't like the editor, and it's a huge chore to configure it to my liking.
MPLAB X also doesn't take account for differences in text rendering on different platforms, so all text fields and buttons kind of overflow and look terrible on OS X. Still, nice of them to support something other than Windows.
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