[wufocaculura]

I used bluej for a while - it was fine as your first IDE as it does not have tons of bells and whistle that overwhelms you. Obviously, as time passes and your skills improve, you will look for better tools. But BlueJ does its job.

I sailed away from java world, which IDEs are being used now? IntelliJ, Netbeans, Eclipse?

[alex_suzuki]

IntelliJ is really popular. Eclipse and Netbeans much less so. IntelliJ profits from “networking effects” from other Jetbrains IDEs like WebStorm, CLion etc.

[flopriore]

Yeah IntelliJ by far is the most popular at the moment. We have been recommended to use it even by our university (in Italy) for the exam "Algorithms and data structures in Java".

[BeefWellington]

Personally I use Eclipse whenever I need to dig into Java codebases these days, though a recent HN thread made me consider giving Netbeans another go.