• Emacs
• Gedit
• Vim
• Sublime Text
• Atom
• Jedit

• Eclipse
• DrJava
• Geany
• BlueJ
• IntelliJ
• VSCode
• JGrasp

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

I've got to start with my tool of choice although I can't really be unbiased. I think it gets a bad wrap because it's old and out of the box looks plain but, yes, you can use your mouse and it does have menus. The upside is that it can do everything an IDE can do and a thousand times more. I do email, read rss feeds, maintain my calendar and more in Emacs.

The downside is that it doesn't do Java well out of the box and kids like shinier objects.

I don't think I'd start the teachers with Emacs but I'd probably shift my instruction to using it at some point and show some of the cooler features (many highlighted in my Emcacs videos)

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit%0A

This is a plain simple editor. You can bucket in notepad+ and whatever the basic Mac editor is in here. Nothing special and nothing fancy. It's easy enough to load, edit a file and save but not much more. I'd be fine using it were it not for better options.

https://www.vim.org/

No

https://www.sublimetext.com/%0A

This was the hotness for a while and it's a pretty slick editor. I can't recommend it for teachers though for two reasons. One is that it's not free (although it isn't expensive). The other is that it's not open source. There were other hot editors before sublime and when their companies folded or sunset the editor all those plugins and customizations had to be redone on a new platform.

https://atom.io/

Atom's an editor I want to like. It's open source and looks pretty neat but it seems more focused on the JS ecosystem. I couldn't find enough Java related plugins to make it better than Gedit although it was easy to theme and customize the keys. Were I not an Emacs guy I'd probably use Atom for much of my non-Java development but it doesn't seem like a great fit for Java

http://www.jedit.org/

This looked like the strongest contender for Java. Not too complicated. Nice syntax highlighting out of the box. It doesn't do completion but that's arguably a good thing when teaching programming (incidentally, Emacs doesn't do completion out of the box but it can be added so you can up the tools ability as the class moves along). From my limited explorations you can install plugins like a Java Linter and you can run a console from inside JEdit which means you can actually type things like javac file.java and then run the program all from within the editor.

Jedit also has some nice builtin macros for boilerplate code like setters and getters.

https://www.eclipse.org

I've used eclipse before and as a Java environment, it's actually pretty nice. You can customize the keys so I set mine to Emacs. It has a lot of plugins, you can compile and test your program from within the IDE and do tons of other things. It's a VERY nice professional tool.

I don't like it for teaching for three reasons. First, it does too much. By giving too much professional support kids rely too much on the tool. Second, it's made for big projects using build systems not small AP class programs consisting of one or two files where you run javac manually. Yes, you can do this in Eclipse but it seems more awkward. Third, becasue there's so much going on you need a HUGE screen and kids and schools might not have enough screen real estate.

There's also a fourth reason which is that I installed Eclipse using LinuxMint's package manager and it crashed when running. If I'm going to recommend a teacher roll out a tool that all of their students are going to install at home on their own, at the very least it has to install and run seamlessly.

http://www.drjava.org/

Like Eclipse, I've used DrJava before. It's similar to DrRacket (nee Scheme) and Dr. Python. It's close to perfect. You get highlighting, helpful error finding, can run your program from within Dr. Java and more.

The killer problem is that I can't get the latest version to run. Actually the first problem is that it's just a jar file so you have to run it with java -jar drjava.jar. Beyond that, it didn't work out of the box. It loaded but compilign and running didn't After some mucking around, I got it to compile but it doesn't run the programs.

This is too bad because when it runs it's a terrific learning environment.

https://bluej.org/

This is another tool that was DOA. I tried the debian package as well as the jar file. Couldn't get it working.

I have used an older version so I'll describe that instead just remember things might be different in the current version.

BlueJ does one thing very well - objects. It visually shows object creation and relationships. I recall that you can create an opject, click on it's box in a visual graph pane, inspect it, instantiate new ones and in general explore and expirement. If you're big on OOP and like Object First by all means check BlueJ out. It's probably best in class for that approach.

On the other hand, it's a one trick pony. If you, like me, are not all in on OOP or an Objects first and all the time approach it's probably not the tool for you.

https://www.geany.org/

I hadn't heard of this one before but it looks like a contender. It has a pretty clean interface and it worked out of the box. I installed it using the package manager.

<figure><img src="/img/geany.png" width="250px"/> </figure>

Class browser on the right, files on the left and console (terminal), compiler status etc on the bottom. It supports some level of autocomplete but it doesn't do everything. I'm not sure yet but it might hit the completion sweet spot.

It says it does snippets but I haven't figured that out yet.

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

IntelliJ is fro JetBrains. They make a bunch of IDEs each focussed on a different toolset but all with the same look and feel. You can also add plugins to each to make them multi-modal. I believe the editor at the core is JEdit. I've used their IDEs in the past and as far as professional IDEs go I like them. They're more lightweight than say Eclipse and don't need the real estate.

Still, I think it's too much for a beginner. For example, you can in theory run your program from the build menu but, much like Eclipse, it takes you to a configuration screen. I was pretty lost and I'm not a beginner. Much like Eclipse it's made for projects not small class programs.

I found the Python version of JetBrains IDEs more approachable probably because the ecosystem is much simpler.

https://code.visualstudio.com/

This one shocked me - I actually found myself liking a Microsoft product. I guess this really isn't your father's Microsoft.

<figure><img src="/img/vscode.png" width="250px"/> </figure>

Much like Geany it has a clean interface and like Geany you don't need a whole Java build system. It does more completions out of the box which you may or may not like as well as snippets. A single key will compile and run your program and on top of all that it has en "Emacs" setting for keybindings.

I'm not sure if I like Geany or VSCode better but I think both are really good options. I'd probably lean towards Geany due to the less robust completions. Were I writing code for real rather than teaching, I'd probably go the other way.

<figure><img src="/img/vscode.png" width="250px"/> </figure>

JGrasp feels much the same as the other contenders - Geany and VSCode but the interface just looks a bit clunkier to me. I know that's purely subjective.

The biggest difference I'm seeing out of the box is that JGrasp doesn't do completions so depending on where you fall with that you might want Jgrasp for none, Geany for some, and VSCode for all.

[EDIT] JGrasp has a very cool visualizer built in that will animate your proram. Here's a video of it in action. I'm going to have to play with this a bit and see if it pushes JGrasp up over the top for me.

https://processing.org/

I'm not going to talk about processing but I felt that it would be negligent not to mention it at all. Processing is a IDE, wrapper and graphical library that's essentially Java under the hood (although there are Processing bindings in many other languages probably the most well known now is p5.js). It's great if you want to do graphical work or base your class around the libraries that are available to processing which include ones for web cameras, hardware access, networking, sound and more but it's not the same as an IDE or editor for traditional Java development.