Netbeans was my absolute favorite IDE for Java development. After its last release, I honestly felt lost.

I’ve gotten back up to speed via IntelliJ but it still doesn’t feel as effortless as it did in Netbeans. And way less care and feeding than Eclipse.

Sorry, there’s a lot of “feels” in this post but for me, Netbeans was the one Java IDE that I didn’t have to fight with.

What do you mean, “last release”? NetBeans 20 was released just this month. I still use it.

Apologies for not clarifying -- the last release of Netbeans prior to the Oracle acquisition of Sun.

Yes Netbeans was very underrated, I used it for making Nokia ME apps. And learning Java.

Still is, quite a few features like Swing editors, or the two way editing between rendering templates and Java code, or the quality of profiling tools for such open source product.

My first Java IDE was Symantec Café (which became Visual Café). I haven't thought about that in 25 years.

I also used NetBeans a bit years ago, though that was mainly because it had a (mostly) WYSIWYG editor compared to Eclipse (technically Eclipse had a plugin for that which supposedly was also superior in how it worked - it parsed the code to figure out what the GUI would look like and updated in place instead of NetBeans' generating code with commented out sections you wasn't supposed to touch - but in practice it was both slow and clunky).

For Java specifically i felt NetBeans was faster and simpler though i bounced between it and Eclipse because i also used Eclipse for other stuff (C++ mainly) so unless i wanted a GUI i used Eclipse. I did stopped writing Java some time ago though.

I did try a recent NetBeans build but i found it much less polished than what i remember from before it became "Apache NetBeans".