It was exciting to see NetBeans 8 released as I use it as my primary editor for PHP projects (along with Xdebug of course) but the excitement was short lived when the navigator window frame was empty for all of my Drupal project files. After a bit of googling and checking the NetBeans bug tracker I wasn’t getting anywhere until I tried one last ditch generic search on Google which held the answer.
According to this blog posting it was discovered that the .install and .module files lose their content type and aren’t parsed as PHP files. A simple configuration change to set the correct content type fixes the issue. Wonderful!