If you need context coloring, I guess vim would be the most light-weight editor with a Java mode (at least I believe it has one).
Personally I'd use the built-in editor because I'm not actually that impressed with coloring and auto-formatting. You'll miss them VERY QUICKLY if you don't have eclipse/netbeans.Īfter that, who cares what editor you use. The most important thing to do then is to be sure you have a local copy of the Javadocs. Okay, so let's say you don't want to upgrade. PCs are more difficult than the mac, but vary based on model. After the upgrade, my bottom-of-the-line mac has never once given me a single time to be concerned about its' performance. I got 4gb for my laptop at fry's for less than $100, and the slots are inside the battery compartment.
Linux performs fairly well with low memory, but pc isn't great and mac is abysmal! (if you have 512M and less than 4gb hard disk free, it will barely work at all! This is because the mac allocates it's swap from 'Free space' on your hard drive)
