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?