IntelliJ is faster than Netbeans. Download the free version and give it a try.

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download

Netbeans performance has gotten better in recent versions. Probably worth keeping an eye on the updates.

I regard NetBeans as a very capable IDE. Consider that VS has, probably, lots of hand-tuned x86 assembly in its guts while NetBeans is nice and portable Java. You could probably run it on an Azul box.

I know. It's an excuse for a perceived lower performance, but it's better to progress slowly in the right direction than to rush at warp speed into the vendor lock-in you seem to have escaped ;-)

I like the Netbeans user experience, but at times I do wish it was a native app. The 'swinginess' of it can make it a bit of an eyesore.

IIRC, Netbeans was the first editor on the Mac that I found where I could just select and hit tab to indent the selection block without having to change any settings. All the other Mac apps I tried would just replace the text with a tab. Coming off of Windows text editors, it was a huge nuisance to me.

> The 'swinginess' of it can make it a bit of an eyesore.

Come on. It's not that bad. Doesn't it default to native look and feel on Macs? I think it does in Windows and it did last time I used it on Linux.

Esthetically, it definitely is a notch below Coda, another native IDE I use.

It really doesn't look very Mac-like. It's tolerable, or I wouldn't use it, but that's as kind as I can get in describing it.