I'm going through an evaluation of MavensMate and Sublime Text as a replacement of Eclipse IDE. Everything is working well and is a great alternative to Eclipse which is clunky and slow.
The main thing I'm missing is a schema explorer to play with SOQL queries and find field developernames. I know I can use the SFDC 'Schema Builder' but it doesn't cover behind the scenes tables like RecordType, OpportunityLineItem etc...
What tools are recommended by the community?
On the Mac, my favorite tool is SoqlXplorer:
Another fantastic one in the toolkit is workbench. Lots of admin tools, including the ability to explore all standard (even the behind the scenes ones) and custom object.
Also good to have a bookmark to the Object Reference handy.
For those running on a Mac, soqlXplorer is a great tool for doing these kind of things. You can run queries easily and then update data in the database by just editing the result rows.
As a couple of alternatives to workbench (which I'd also recommend)
On Windows you can use the FuseIT SFDC Explorer* to get the API names for sObjects and compose SOQL queries.
* This falls into the shameless self promotion category as I work for the company that makes it. Still it is free, and it can be good to have alternatives.
There is also the Force.com Explorer which is AIR based.
The Force.com CLI
/>force sobject list
I am building a Force.com web IDE. Still in Beta.
Functionality:
Create new Apex Triggers Classes, Visualforce Pages & Components
Select from a list of predefined templates to create class stubs
Code debugger
Run Anonymous Apex Code
Run SOQL queries
Run Batch queries
Metadata viewer and download
Code Metrics Dashboard
Try it out: http://cloudsole.com
