Netbeans: Where's my Refresh button gone?

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If you ever find yourself in that annoying situation where netbeans refuses to see a file or set of files you’ve added to a folder, there is a solution.

My instinct having used netbeans for the past year was to right-click the folder and click Refresh. The problem being that the Refresh item was missing from the menu!

It turns out that if you have “Enable auto-scanning of sources” enabled (which it is by default) in “Tools->Options->Miscellaneous->Files”, netbeans assumes that it will know when you add a file, so you’ll never have to refresh the folders. Unfortunately, that assumption is not always correct and the folder will not refresh.

So the answer is to uncheck that option, right-click the folder and “Refresh”, and if you like the option, turn it back on.