Skip to main content

Why did I break up with my Eclipse IDE?

The breakup was inevitable. My relationship with eclipse had got sour and more. Most of the time it won't listen to my commands and crave for attention. Many times it crashed without giving any valid reasons. I had lost peace of mind and decided that this relationship has run its course. It was time we seek a legal separation, it was not me, it was eclipse.

Two months ago I abandoned eclipse. Yes, it was painful. But it was necessary. As they say if you find your love only when you let go the wrong one (I know I should stop reading Jane Austen for a while). I spend the next couple of minutes trying to find the right replacement for Eclipse but a relationship of 8 years is hardly worth forgetting, is it?

A quick Google search highlighted two favorite keywords in one sentence. Anyone who has done bit of coding anywhere knows the power SublimeText has on your mind. Yes the beautiful, colourful, intended code and the ease of search using grep and regex. As mind wandered aimlessly into the countless Google pages, it wondered won't it be cool to have a IDE build on Sublime?

And thats when I met Mavens Mate. It was like love at first sight, there was no turning back. Here I was in the middle of discovering a great relationship.
The very thing you notice about this great editor is that its simplicity of use. There is a slight learning curve on its usage but not a steep hill climb. It was match-made in heaven, it did not consume RAM, did not crave for my attention and whenever I gave it a command, it simply ran its processes in background.

Here are few reasons why you need to move on.
Thats me with my new love at the London Summer of Hacks


1. Easy to Install
Mavens Mate is extremely easy to install. Install Sublime, install Chrome (shame on you if you call yourself a developer and don't have these two things) and get the plugin

2. Incredibly responsive
I was never able to figure out why Eclipse used to consume so much energy to compile a few lines of code. Its efficiency could only be compared to Eddie the computer on board of Heart of Gold who burned its entire resources to make english tea. MavensMate is fast and did not consume as many resources as Eclipse. There are a few hiccups while using it, but nothing that cannot be fixed with a quick Google search.

3. Ability to Work on and Edit static resources 
MavensMate provides a easy to operate interface to write and deploy static resources using sublime text. The resource bundle makes you head pain less while working with static resources. 

4. Somethings eclipse just refuses to help you
Imagine you on the clock, some important delivery is coming up. The company and the client is looking at you. You know coming Monday your clients shiny new office is going to get a shiny new system were they can work much more efficiently than ever and lo, the test classes are still undone. Now that would be a normal thing but eclipse suddenly feels low and it takes down your entire system. If it has not happened before, well you are lucky, but since my few months of playing around with Sublime, it has not gone down once. 

5. The interface is slick

Black does not hurt the eyes as much as bright white does. It becomes immently painful to stare at the white background for hours. The interface is slick with very less.

Bottom line: I feel in love with this shiny new toy that lets me do code and worry about other things less. Sublime text is worth given a try. Its free, fast and fun. You would not regret the decision. There was the time in the past were we had no choice but to use eclipse, Mavens Mate has changed that and perhaps for good. I have also discovered this new cloud based editor Aside.io


I often use Aside.io when I am away from my Mac or using some shared machine. One of the coolest thing about Aside is that unlike all the other editors, it doesn't require your username, password or token. It simply connects using oAuth, meaning one click 'Allow' and you are done.

Aside.io is build by a dear friend Phil Rymek and it built on heroku. Aside.io comes packing with much more cooler stuff than any other editors out there. It has a rad of features that many editors lack and has become my favorite thing. It is a easy to use cloud based editor that has no hassles of installing and maintaining one. 

Here are few of the coolest features that Aside.io comes packing.



Save conflict detection
Static Resource support, including editing zipped files
Edit Custom Object metadata
Debug log access
Find and replace within file
Org-wide code search
Local code history
"Open in Salesforce", allowing easy access to rendered VF pages and more
Look and feel of editor is fully configurable (theme, font size, invisibles, etc)
Highlight lines not unit tested and see other coverage information
See all unit test results, class-by-class
Configure the result view to focus on certain unit tests
Easily drill into failures with the stack trace parser
Run unit tests three different ways
Manual selection - from a multi-select typeahead
Generate a code coverage report for organization
Maintains query history
Show/hide/reorder/resize columns
Share queries with other users

The list keeps on increasing. The best part about Aside.io is that if you are keen on checking it out, one click does it.

Which is your favorite editor? Let me know in comments.

Comments

Popular Post

The unofficial guide to become a Certified Salesforce Administrator (ADM 201)

In my attempt at maximum certifications in 60 days, I completed Salesforce Certified Administrator exam on February 11th 2013 So you have decided to ramp up your career and take certifications in your hand. Good choice. It is also likely that this is the first time you have heard of Salesforce, certification and since your company has a vision of you completing the certification you have decided to do it. At this stage it is likely that, You have done extensive googling. You have received countless brain-dumps. And you have received plenty of advise from different types of users which ranges from Admin certification is easier than making coffee to Admin certification is tougher than building a rocket-ship to fly off to the moon. The purpose of this guide is to give you a clear understanding of what to expect when you are expected to become Certified Salesforce Administrator. To bring sense to all the things you have seen so far and to clearly explain what to do and what

Some PDF tricks on Visualforce: Landscape, A4, page number and more

The beauty of Visualforce is simplicity. Remember the shock you received when you were told the entire page renders as PDF if you just add renderAs=PDF to the Page tag. For those who thought I spoke alien language right now, here is the trick, to render a page as PDF, we add a simple attribute to the <apex: page> tag <apex: page renderAs='pdf'> This will render the entire page as PDF. Now, say we need to add some extra features to the PDF. Like a page number in the footer or we need to render the page in landscape mode. Faced with this problem, I put on my Indiana Jones hat and went hunting for it in the vast hay-sack of the internet (read: googled extensively). Imagine my happiness when i found a big big page with many big big examples to solve the problem. The document I am referring to is from W3C, paged Box media . Long story short, I now possess the ultimate secret of rendering the page in any format I want. So here are few tricks I learned from the p

The Basics of writing a Apex Trigger

One of the most important and common asked question on Forums and everywhere is how do I write a trigger. Coding in Apex Trigger is like going to a dentist for a root canal, you keep dreading the moment until you realize it is actually not going to hurt you. If you plan to write an Apex Trigger this quick guide will help you doing so. The first and foremost rule in writing a trigger is to remember the oldest suggestion given to the most comprehensive Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy, ' Don't Panic. ' Writing a trigger is not a rocket science, in-fact we should thank the team at Salesforce and ForceDotCom for making everything so simple, that anyone can do it. Enough of talk, lets code. So you want to write a trigger. Let us have a glimpse of what we are going to build. The problem statement is as follows Problem:  When the User is entering the Opportunity, check for the Opportunity Amount. If the Opportunity Amount is greater than 50,000. Mark the Parent Account as