I’m new to Java so I am looking at various tools. I tried LWJGL with Netbeans and it seems pretty straightforward. Is there any benefit to using it with Eclipse? Is there a preferred IDE for game developers for any reason whatsoever, or is it really just personal preference? Any other tips are welcome.
Eclipse is just a lot prettier and nicer 
But it’s really just a matter of taste. Check out my thread that started a nerd war .
There are differences between them but I wouldn’t be able to say what to pick, as from a game developer’s perspective, there are no real benefits (that I know of) to pick one over the other.
Each IDE (eclipse, netbeans, intelliJ) has its strengths and weaknesses and I think it is a matter of style and preference. I use eclipse. I have tried the other 2 as well and they all felt awkward but that is because I haven’t invested enough time to become fluent in them. I use the keyboard a lot and although there are tons of cheat-sheets out there, I felt that eclipse is the most intuitive one for me as it was the first one I used.
This is probably the same message you will get from the other camps (Netbeans and IntelliJ users) too.
I have picked eclipse because I did a lot of enterprise software and eclipse had really nice plug-ins to help me with that (eclipse, maven, hibernate, servers, sql, etc). I don’t think that this is the case for game development as it is more code than other stuff so you’re safe with anything that has good code completion and refactoring features.
Good luck!
not “really”.
just use what you like, you can still switch later
I had performance problems with Netbeans, including insane CPU usage and memory leaks. It worked flawlessly for several years though, so I might have just f*cked something up myself. I’m on Eclipse now though.
I too experienced some strange CPU and memory usage using NetBeans. I mostly use eclipse unless I need to make some fancy GUI using swing 
then I use NetBeans
Eclipse has better android support.