why do some people write code in notepad instead of an IDE? what are the advantages to it? im just curious. How would using say lwjgl in notepad be different from using it in an ide like jcreator or eclipse?
some people dont like the huge applications that are IDEs. Using notepad doesn’t give you any aid, so if you like manually typing everything, then notepad is for you.
If you are beginning to code in java and have step by step tutorials that explain how to write your first class, what the classpath is, what java and javac are and how they are used etc. notepad can help focus on what you are learning, since you don’t have to find your way through myriads of menues and views and learn how to setup a project in an IDE.
Other than that, I consider notepad useless for java programming. Everyone should try to find a decent IDE (Netbeans, Idea, Eclips, JCreator etc.) or at least a project aware syntax colorizing editor (ConTEXT, Programmers Notepad, Emacs? etc.).
There were claims in this forum before, that one is able to manage a project with 500 classes using notepad and explorer just as good/fast as in an IDE. I consider this a plain lie 
Though I use an Eclipse now, I used to program in a text editor. If for some reason you want to avoid an IDE, I would suggest Textpad from http://textpad.com/ instead of Notepad. I still use Textpad for regular text files and PHP.
Textpad has a document select and other goodies that Notepad doesn’t. It even has code coloring if you download the appropriate plug-in, but it’s still no IDE.
When I was using Textpad, my computer wasn’t good enough to run modern IDEs well. And some of the old ones are pretty bad.
As said before, I think it’s good to use a simple text editor when you start learning java. I also used TextPad for that (the best ever text editor IMO, notepad possibly the worst), and made the move to Eclipse later as soon as I got sick of my own typos ;D
I started out using QBasic and Borland Turbo C++ 6.[something, maybe 1 or 2]; and I don’t remember anything fancy other than QBasic keeping certain variables using the same case and allowing subroutines (functions) to live in their own window (sort of). But it was an IDE nonetheless, so although its text features were simple it did have that whole “1 click compile” feature that allowed me to focus on my programming and not anything else.
allright, so i understand that using an ide is a lot easier. so i think ill just use an ide.
new question. I’m using linux now, and im pretty sure jcreator wont work with it. i hear eclipse is a very nice ide, but its resource intensive and might run slowly on a semi old laptop. if it turns out that its too slow, whats a good lightweight, simpler ide that can run on linux?
For Eclipse you need 256MB of RAM otherwise you will be running very slow. Other than that it is not very CPU intensive. The SUN SDK might not eat up as much memory.
You could try to use the Java SE version of Netbeans 6 Beta1 (http://bits.netbeans.org/download/6_0/beta1/latest/index.html), which works great for me. You could also try DrJava (http://drjava.sourceforge.net/), as it claims to be lightweight (and maybe featureless ;))