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Mignu FMignu F 

Which IDE to use?

Hi All,
I am a beginner SF developer.  I was trying to download MavensMate to use for an IDE but it appears that it's no longer being supported.  From what I have read, MavensMate was highly regarded.  What IDE should I use instead?  Eclipse or Visual studio via the extension?
Matt Azlin 13Matt Azlin 13
I've used the developer console for most of my development.  Recently, I've been directed to look at Visual Studio Code when working with the new DX features.  It depends on how complex the work you're doing is.  If you're doing pure apex or visualforce, you can probably get by with the dev console.
Tad Aalgaard 3Tad Aalgaard 3
Developer Console works fine, but there are drawbacks.
- no way to add to source control, you need a downloaded version of the page, component, class, etc that you can push to Git or Subversion
- you can easily overwrite others code without knowing as it doesn't check like a desktop IDE will
- I am experiencing a strange cursor issue in Chrome where my cursor is off several spaces depending on how long the line of code is
- no real type ahead
- just plain very basic editor, good for beginners but ongoing development should be done in an external IDE

- Force.com (Eclipse) offers real debugging, other IDEs don't, but can be a bit sluggish for saving and retrieving meta data
- Sublime and MavensMate (takes a bit to set up, but easy to use), probably the most popular that I have seen
- Welkin Suite - using VisualStudio is really taylored to SFDC development, it's all they do
- IntelliJ - tried it once, works fine
Marco Zisa 2Marco Zisa 2
I would point out that FORCE.COM plugin will be no longer supported soon...
I am currently using to Visual Studio Code as IDE + Salesforce Extension Pack and Salesforce DX CLI.

To replace MavensMate you may give a try to Salesforce Org Manager (https://github.com/mzisa/salesforce-org-manager), which is an open source project proposing an org metadata manager like MavensMate, with treeview rendering of the Org's metadata and works specifically with VS Code as code editor.

Feel free to contact me for any questions.