This was first and official IDE from Salesforce and enjoyed monopoly as one and only IDE for many years.
The Force.com IDE is a powerful client application for creating, modifying and deploying Force.com applications. Based on the Eclipse platform and built on the Tooling API, the Force.com IDE provides a comfortable environment for programmers familiar with integrated development environments, letting you code, compile, test, package, and deploy all from within the IDE. Much of the actual work, such as compilation, happens on the Force.com platform—the Force.com IDE performs the communication and result parsing transparently.
The Force.com IDE is open-source and you can download the source code on GitHub.
Sometimes I use Force.com IDE only for ApexPMD plugin, which analyse Apex code and provides some area where code can be improved like SOQL written in loop.
If you are coming from .Net background or love Visual studio then this is IDE of your choice. This is Visual Studio based IDE with lots of cool features like local history, intuitive interface, Visual Studio look and feel many more goodies. However, currently it doesn’t support lightning components or application.
This is also one of mostly loved cloud based IDE among developers. It is very easy to setup and use, It also supports lightning components. You can read more about its capabilities here , if you want to use it then navigate to this URL.
This is currently my choice of development IDE and currently recommended and supported by Salesforce. There are lots of capability to fall in love with this editor and most important is Performance profiling, Checkpoints, Query execution plan, Log files and many more to count.
This is plugin for Sublime text and roughly around 80% of developers are using it. This is also opensource and very powerful IDE. You can find more about differences and features supported by Force.com IDE, Developer console and Mavensmate in this post.
This IDE started popping up between developers of many other programming languages like a storm and thanks to Mavensmate team who has created plugin for Salesforce to work with Atom. Currently its in Beta build and hopefully we will be able to see production built very soon.
This is also one of very first web based IDE launched when Salesforce announced Tooling API , very fast and easy to use. I used this IDE a lot last year before moving back to developer console.
This is cloud based IDE and provides many promising features for Salesforce.
Illuminated Cloud – JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Plugin for Salesforce
Illuminated Cloud is a powerful new Force.com development tool hosted within JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA. Illuminated Cloud is hosted within IntelliJ IDEA—both Community Edition and Ultimate Edition are supported—users are also able to leverage IDEA’s extensive core feature set for Force.com development including its powerful source code editors, polyglot language support for composite applications, and tight integration with version control, task management, and bug tracking systems.
This is new IDE for Salesforce and developers started using it pretty fast. I am using its chrome extension, however as per website, its available for Mac in appstore and soon going to be released for window store.
It very easy to use and fast as well. You can download it from chrome store. It has variety of feature packs, but my favorite is support for Lightning Component development.
You want to create your own IDE ?
If you you are still not happy with above options and want to give some efforts then you can create your own IDE. This post walks through my Dreamforce 2014 session on creating IDE in 30 minutes.
If I missed your favorite IDE, then please share your feedback.
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