John Storta Jr. wrote:I am surprised I have seen no mention of jEdit in this thread. I have used it for years and it is very good for all sorts of code. Not as rich as a full NetBeans/Eclipse IDE, but much better than Notepad.
Plus it is written in Java.
As for whether to use an IDE straight away or something less featured, I definitely recommend using plain old text editors like jEdit until you get into larger projects that need more management. I tried using NetBeans and Eclipse for stuff and I always found they were hiding too much from me as I was trying to learn. When you starting out you need to see every details so you know exactly what is happening. If the IDE hides it from you, then you might get functional code, but you do not really know what mistakes you made.
Only start using the IDE when you understand exactly what it is doing behind the scenes.