Rubenerd

Some people seem to have an almost religious attachment to their text editors of choice, I need not give examples. I tend to gravitate between Vim and MacVim for hacking together single files and TextMate for projects, so when I started doing Java at university again I just fired up the Java bundle in TextMate and off I went.

Back when I was a C++ guy on Windows in early high school I used Visual Studio 6 and later C# in their .NET IDE, but since then I've eschewed IDEs in general because I feel as though they take too much control over what I'm doing, they're complicated and they keep wanting to insert their own code into my files which drives me crazy!

When I started uni and before my major family meltdown back in 2005 I was told to use jGRASP for Java and later Eclipse and NetBeans and I have to admit I decided to go back to a basic text editor (nano at the time), but having just downloaded NetBeans 6.7.1 it seems to have changed a lot in a few short years! The interface is much more Mac-like and it feels nowhere near as sluggish as it did before. I'm still control-freaky enough to want to start my projects from scratch with absolutely nothing (and TextMate is brilliant for this) but there's something to be said for an IDE dedicated to the language you're using.

If you're a Java developer on Mac what editor or IDE do you use to create your poetic scientific whatnot?