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Message: [QUOTE="nebulous99, post: 2980151"] Eclipse is highly recommended. Some people also like netbeans. A few people here will now try to sell you something; I suggest you ignore them unless you are wealthy enough that you routinely lose fifties and C-notes between the sofa cushions and don't miss them for months before eventually finding them again. Preferably, rich enough that a whole roll of these can go missing and this fact go unnoticed for months. Not using an IDE is less of an option with Java than with many languages, because of this many-files requirement. Any nontrivial project is going to blow out the maximum of four recently-opened files lots of text editors have on their file menu MRU, which means manually navigating and typing stuff for a minute or two fairly often when changing files. Tabbed editors with ten-item MRUs are out there but many are crippled or timebombed instead of free, and none will cope with anything truly substantial without running out of room for tabs you can still use easily and conveniently, running out of MRU items, or both. Eclipse, and probably all other IDEs, provides handy built-in project- file navigation and Eclipse at least definitely also provides tabbed editing of code. The left window pane in Eclipse by default will have a tree of your project's source files and ancillary stuff like resources and package-html files and the like; one double-click and you're in any file you please, with maybe some scrolling if you have a big project and a low resolution monitor (<1024 pixels high, say). Someone here will probably be perverse now and remark that something called "emacs" has some obscure "mode" that does the same thing with a file tree at left, but I doubt this is the route you want to go. Not if you don't fancy spending many hours memorizing obscure hotkeys from cheatsheets before you can even contemplate being productive, and having to use wacky keyboard commands to get to, select in, and get back from the tree pane. Not to mention the tree pane even if identical to Eclipse kind of loses its luster when cramped down to being only 24 items high max, and you would probably have to find, download, and install a plugin to get it to boot. Eclipse is easy enough to use that you can just install it, run it, look at a few things quickly, and then start working in it without prior experience of anything except some Java knowledge and basic GUI manipulation knowledge of the sort taught in grade school nowadays. You can go from Eclipse-n00b to a working Hello, World in less than half an hour very easily, and probably in about 10 minutes. [/QUOTE]

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