can anyone suggest a (small) free Java IDE

Java? *shudders*!!

check this out
http://freshmeat.net/projects/eclipseproject/

Dr Java maybe? It's "fast" considering it's made with Java and does a very good job. If you need only a good text editor, jEdit is a good choice!

Regards!

vim?

netbeans ?
http://www.netbeans.org/

When the first time you install it, JEdit is just a text editor. But there are a lot of plugins for jedit. Use the plugin manager and exploy the plugins. After you download and install several plugins and properly configure it, surprisingly, it will become a very powerful IDE. You can see your methods and variable list, you can compile and run the code within IDE, you can creat the project tree, you can decompile and see the source-code of the java libraries and you can do anything you want with it.
So the power of JEdit comes from its plugins.
JEdit is a very good choice to use as a light weight IDE.

And one annoying thing in this forum is that whenever someone asks for an IDE, some always bring up the stupid "vim" or "emacs" text editors. (emacs has a few IDE features ofcourse). I'm sure these 2 editors would be very powerful in those days, a few decades ago, in the console based computers, but today, they are not worth using more than the system administration purpose, for editing the configuration files.

moeminhtun, that is not necessarily so (not wanting to start another Emacs-vs-VI-vs-the-world-thread here). I'm not that much acquainted with VI, but Emacs is an excellent tool in many aspects. When I was working with Haskell (or to be specific, Hugs), Emacs was THE editor of choice. The right tool for the right job, and all that. (And hey - you can play Tetris in it!)

As for Java editing; in Linux (KDE), I prefer to use Kate. It's not an IDE, but workflow is fast. I have a real problem with all the editors/IDE's written in Java, since they're so mind-boggingly slow (even the small ones, to my experience). If I had to use one, I would probably go with JEdit though. For Windows there's this fabulous, free IDE called JCreator LE, which is written in C++; it's fast and does pretty much anything you want it to. Unfortunately other platforms are not supported.

If there's a text editor for Java that I thumbs up for is Windows(R) TextPad(R). It supports a lot of languages, it can compile Java and run Java/Applets easily, plus it's deadly fast... Unfortunately it's not free.... like 99% of Windows applications .

Now I've to agree with nvn.. Although jEdit is awesome, I'm still about to see a Java application which is not slow. I love Java over C++ for it's syntaxes and 100% OO, but it still is slow for most speed critical tasks

Vim is not just a text editor. It has many plugins and macro which you can get from its website. Combined with that you can make Vim as IDE.

I don't know about Emacs.

you will find text editors but i doubt you will find
a free small ide(i think i understand what you mean by ide) and it won't be fast too...
jbuilder, netbeans are what you could call ides which are not small and not fast for example

jedit,jext are text editors small and free written in java and run at a decent speed
eclipse is a big ide which download size is about 65mb and is not that fast too.