I've used eclipse for a lot of purposes. At the beginning to write code and later mostly for deployments.
Now I see, that Salesforce is focusing on Visual Studio Code for the future.
I love and hate eclipse and force.com IDE at the same time. I love it because it can do a lot. I hate it, because its old, slow, full of bugs and greedy for local resources on my notebook.
But my primary needs are not around Scratch Orgs and the most important things are
- Edit and Save Apex, Visualforce, Lightning Components and JS in zipped static resources on any Org (especially normal DEs and Sandboxes) without using repositories and with a simple ctrl+s to save
- doing that save very very quickly (im counting miliseconds and I want the highest speed possible with an org using)
- deploy stuff like with eclipse: select multiple mixed types of metadata on the UI (like pages, layouts, apex, components at the same time), right click, deploy to ANY server
I've had a glance on Visual Studio Code and read a bit into DX but my old school requirements are addressed only partly and DX seems all about scratch orgs and Scratch Orgs I do not want to use. I don't want to discuss or elaborate "why" but only say that we need huge masses of complex linked SObject record data and complex org prerequisites plus configuration even for simple developments. I can't and DON'T WANT to recreate in that the scratch org livecyle. I know a lot could be automated but it would be a huge effort I don't want to invest into that right now.
Is it already possible now or will it be possible at some time in the future to use Visual Studio Code more like eclipse or will it only stay closely coupled with scratch orgs?
Best Answer
DX is a new shift in Salesforce development. It's not meant to be an IDE-based development cycle. Instead, you use a Scratch Org to quickly build out new features, then use 2GP (Second Generation Packaging) to quickly deploy those changes to new orgs. If you choose to use a Sandbox instead of a Scratch Org, you lose the benefits of faster development cycles, but you can still use DX in that situation. There's no strict requirement that DX use Scratch Orgs or repositories. These are simply optimal development cycles.
The new force:source:retrieve and force:source:deploy features enable you to quickly retrieve and deploy a limited amount of metadata to/from your computer/org. It's not as fast as force:source:push and force:source:pull, but these commands are geared for developers that don't want to use Scratch Orgs or repositories. However, they are slower, and you will not get "millisecond-fast" saving using these features. Ultimately, you'll end up needing to use the Developer Console if you go this route.
In other words, if what you need is a new IDE, DX is not the tool you're really looking for. At least, not today. It may include better support for Force.com-style functionality in the future, but for now, that's how it is meant to be used. You simply can't obtain the speed and versatility of Force.com IDE today with DX. However, it is likely that something like that will occur in the future, either by salesforce.com directly or a third part developer that leverages DX to perform this sort of functionality, but for now, DX is not the solution you're looking for; it does not meet your requirements.