Ever since I’ve been working on Salesforce development, using the official Salesforce Eclipse-based IDE on Mac has been very painful. Everything is extremely slow and that’s just not an environment that is enjoyable to use. Editing directly in the text editor of the Sandbox was my quick-and-dirty way of changing code without going through the process of launching this monster Salesforce IDE.
I was looking for some kind of plugins to do Salesforce development using Sublime Text 2. What I found was even much better than what I expected.
MavensMate IDE for Force.com on GitHub (OS X only)
Using the instructions available here, you use some commands in the terminal to install the add-on. It adds a new menu to Sublime Text exclusively for your Salesforce APEX development.
After configuring your Salesforce user/password (with your security token appended to the password), you decide which objects metadata to load locally and you are good to go. You have access to your classes, tests, triggers, visualforce, etc..
You can also run your tests, verify code coverage of your tests, and you get auto-completion on your code using the metadata loaded previously.
Just the same as if you were using the Salesforce IDE, but much better integrated in your Sublime development environment!
Jérôme Gagnon-Voyer 