Notepad++ is good, but there are tons of great options. Many swear by a particular editor, but I suspect they are all valid choices, and it's largely personal taste and usage patterns.
Every programmer I know uses a text editor. Even those that use a more full featured IDE use a text editor for working with code snippets, loose scripts, writing notes, and working with text data. Some advanced programmers swear by going IDE-free. I don't. IDEs are particularly important for navigating large code bases.
There are a few tasks where I prefer Eclipse, a lot where I prefer IntelliJ, but I can't think of any reason to use NetBeans any more.
Others:
- Linux or Mac OS. Windows has terrible shell options.
- oh-my-zsh (
https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh). A better shell than bash.
- git for version control. Mercurial is fine too. I prefer git simply because it won the "war" for critical mass of this type of hash based open source version control system.
- Gradle for builds. Gradle is a far more cleaner, concise, flexible version of Maven. IDE-specific scripts are terrible.
- pandoc. You should write your docs and notes in some markup format or "markdown" or something similar. Pandoc is excellent at converting to pdf or web.
- Scala. The only good reason to not use Scala is Android, where getting Scala to work is a headache. For desktop work, Scala is a must.
- R + ggplot2. If you need to track any kind of data, or make any type of data plots, this is the best.
