I'm curious what is the most useful IDE when writing Apex (coming from a c# background).
I've already gone ahead and setup Eclipse, but it seems fairly clunky, and not feature packed like other options such as Cloud9 or Welkin.
I'm just trying to not hinder myself by choosing a poor IDE, and after writing only in the Developer Console within Salesforce it's a fairly bad solution to writing code.
Initially I was using Eclipse when it was build using metadata API, was bit slow, still is!
After introduction of Tooling API, lot of IDE came up like the ones you'd mentioned and even Force.com plugin has tooling API implemented later.
Refer this post for all options- List of IDE available for Salesforce coding
After trying couple of them, I find Mavensmate plugin with Sublime Text much promising, so would like to recommend it.
You should try different ones and see which is most comfortable and suits your requirement.
Coming from a Eclipse based environments.
After we went to Cloud9 based IDE without local installation.
It really depends what IDE you feel comfortable with and the team you are working with and can work efficiently.
Hope this helps.
All my team is using Illuminated Cloud, has everything what we need, anonymous Apex,Soql, advanced code prediction, deployment modules, and all of intellij advantages.
On the horizont there is also JEDide which can be interesting because of offline code checking but i think that it needs some time to grow.
