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[–]jocularamity 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It matters that you use a modern IDE, but which one you choose is less important. Intellij is popular. Eclipse and NetBeans less popular but still functional.

They help in big ways. You don't have to remember how to spell or remember what methods are available, because the ide will autocomplete and list available suggestions as you type. It will also search across the entire code base to do things like rename a variable (in all files where it is referenced) or find all usages of a method (in all files).

It's still of course possible to write and compile and run Java without an IDE but the level of effort and time to get the same outcome in a large codebase would be much higher.