Not convinced that this is indeed common enough to provide a wizard for, but
will leave to Milos to decide this.

can you write in more detail in what situations is that common? in my
experience, the current set of netbeans IDE modes is quite sufficient and we
hardly ever add a new mode.
however I believe we should have all modes defined already in the platform and
these should have more neutral names (not debugger/output/palette).

not for 5.0 though.

I guess it will be much more common for platform users, who might be building 
their own applications that can be quite different from NetBeans. In my 
specific case, I was writing a module to bring back the old Execution window, 
so I needed a new mode located besides the Output window, as the old mode in NB 
3.6 used to work. And defining modes is harder than defining a TopComponent, 
for example, since there are those "misterious" number/weight attributes which 
take quite a while to understand.

part of the problem is that modes are scattered around the IDE and it's clusters. 
Mode definitions are tightly coupled together, I suspect if only part of the
modes get into platform, it might not even work correctly.

in your specific case, you probably want to include the mode definition from
debugger module.

my current idea of solving the modes problem is to put all mode definitions into
one place, make it part of platform , possibly define more default modes than
there are currently. give them more descriptive names as well.
that should solve the problem for 99% of platform/IDE users and no  apisupport
for that are should ne necessary (apart for some visual display of the layout
maybe when creating a topcomponent.)

mkleint's ideas seem more promising.