Peter Rooke wrote:Why not just use vi, it will hurt your head at first, but its worth knowing.
As someone who switches between various server environments every day, I know you are right. However, for a beginner, I think the learning curve of VI combined with trying to learn Java is a bit much.
I usually use
JEdit for simple tasks on any platform (written in Java!). I recently embarked on a journey of discovery to find a more "Macish" text editor. I tried
Geany (which is probably more Linux-ish), but it didn't light my fire.
There are many others. One of my recent hires adores
Sublime Text. It's pretty slick if you like working with the keyboard (like VI).
Brackets looks very cool and is backed by Adobe, but it looked a little web page-centric for my purposes.
With this many choices, one should try a few and keep the one(s) they like working with.