What is the best Java IDE for Mac OS X?

Netbeans for mac. Des...

IntelliJ IDEA is an outstanding IDE, with marvelous features that surprise and delight. The Community Edition is free. There is an excellent Scala plugin for it. http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

Eclipse works fine for me (OS X, still PowerPC mainly).

Personally, I use IntelliJ IDEA for everything that requires an IDE, but Emacs for the rest. I like it enough to have paid the money for a full "ultimate" license, which says something. For me, it gets out of the way when I don't want to pay attention to it, and its suggestions and refactoring works well in all the languages that I care about.

http://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCUQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fspring.io%2Ftools%2Fsts&ei=uXKWVJviDpDhuQTcwILICQ&usg=AFQjCNFMaNcAUWpKF4H8TNnvyPb1WPdkPg&sig2=tUINFIzOT1mXRLKDJIDC9A&bvm=bv.82001339%2Cd.c2E - This is an eclipse based IDE which comes with all dependent plugins needed for java spring development pre-installed. Though you don't need spring, you can still give it a try because you might need those plugins for java  too! Saved me a hell lot of time installing and configuring plugins in eclipse and helped me get started sooner.

The developers where I work are given the freedom to choose and IDE they want, and they universally use Eclipse. I am a bioinformatics scientist and don't do a whole lot of Java coding (at this point, mostly just plugins for Cytoscape), and I use Eclipse as well (I use TextMate 2 for scripting languages). For the developers, I think Eclipse is favored because of the wide variety of integrations with other services. For me, I use it mostly because when I started doing Java programming ( a long time ago), Eclipse popped up as the first IDE that performed decently, did completion and java doc integration -- the main features I wanted. I got used to it.

I think most java developers are still using eclipse. I use it. It's actually gotten fairly stable. It bugs me how much *stuff* it has, but it works. The main reason to use eclipse is that when you pick up open source projects to incorporate into yours, they often are built with maven and maven is well integrated into eclipse. Having said this, it's been a long time since I've used anything other than eclipse for java, so I can't comment on the quality of other java ides. I have, though, been using textmate for Ruby and XCode for Objective C, so I get a variety of IDE goodness/badness in my day to day coding. None of them have managed to capture ideas in my brain and turn them into code yet. Someday, eh? Oh, and I'm on a mac as well.

I use Oracle JDeveloper at work, but am pretty fine with Gvim/Emacs at on Mac at home. I do use GVim/Emacs at work too. IDE only abstracts the compilation and provides auto-completion. GVim with the right set of plugins also provides support for auto completion and since, most of the compilation scripts are either Ant/Maven, those are pretty good at command line as well. So, if you doing some light weight programming, I would recomment GVim, TextWranggler, Emacs, etc tools. But if you are building a huge code base, I would recommend an IDE. I like JDeveloper, but there seems to be more vociferous support for Open Source IDEs like Netbeans/Eclipse. Pick one that you can get more comfortable in a few days and use it. You don't have to marry it and live with it for-ever!

IntelliJ and Eclipse are both very powerful IDEs used widely. Both provide effective tools for project management and debugging/code management. IntelliJ has some particularly nice features out of the box in terms of code completion/generation and pre-compilation validation. By particularly nice, that is to say, significantly reducing the amount of work you have to do in any project. Eclipse is good out of the box, but with plugins and customization can be tuned for a highly efficient personal workflow. I find myself creating projects with a specific project layout and exploiting templates, then moving into a different debug perspective that consistently puts the information I want where I want it, and into a testing view where I can get overview and breakdowns of code status and performance. Either way you can't go wrong. slightly different feature sets, however.