Choosing a Java IDE for homework assignments

I've used Notepad++ to do this for simple Java projects and it worked quite well. Here is a guide on how to do this.

You may also want to check out jEdit, I believe it offers similar functionality, and may be more feature-rich for Java than Notepad++ is.

My school uses DrJava for the first intro to programming class. Its a lightweight IDE and allows you to create folders on the fly for your java classes.

However, my classes now require Eclipse or Netbeans, and it did take some getting used to them. In some places, Eclipse is overkill for a second-year CS student, but I do like its features & am having fun exploring the extensability with other languages.

I've been doing java school assignments using Eclipse. I had one project called "Homework", and created a new package for each assignment. That worked fine for me.

Update: in addition to the practice suggested above, it seems eclipse has a subproject (still in incubation, though) called ide4edu that is specifically for educational purposes.

The Eclipse IDE for Education is a version of Eclipse streamlined specifically for use by university and college students.

In Eclipse, you can just paste code into the package explorer without a given project, and a new project is created containing a file with that code, inside a main method. If the text you paste is a full class, it will name the file according to the class name. You could also set up a single project for your stuff and paste the code or the files you want to run into that project.