Using MavensMate and SublimeText For Apex and Visualforce Development

Recently i tried the mavensmate open source IDE for the force.com mentioned in the site and was quite impressed on windows .It hardly took time for me to understand and start using it .Thanks to excellent UI and its support with sublime text editor .

Let me document few initial settings i did to get this up and running and there is lot to speak on how to use this .I will highlight major points in this blog and that should be good enough to start using this .

Lets begin with how to set this up

For IOS and Linux i have no experience configuring this but looks like documentation for the same is very clear in User Guide

For windows i did configure it and was stuck at a place and i will elaborate at this step so that some one dont pull out hair searching and googling lot 

Following things needed to be downloaded

1)Git Download
2)Sublime Text 3
3)MavensMate.exe file

One by one we need to download the above and keep installing on windows machine .Please note i have provided the link .And hence clicking on above hyperlinks should help you to find location from where to get installed 

I was stuck on how to provide path form my local machine

The screenshot of the error i received when i first tried creating project





















So the error is [ mm property] is not set so lets resolve this .

The error can be resolved by setting your local path on the default settings file .

mm_workspace was empty and i have given my file patch here as "mm_workspace" : ":\\Users\\mshrivasta002\\Mavensmate" and now we are ready to create projects

     {
	//set to absolute location where you wish your MavensMate project to reside
	//if the location does not exist, MavensMate will attempt to create it
	//for example: "/Users/username/Documents/workspaces/mavensmate" (notice the absolute path)
	//WINDOWS USERS: it's probably best to set this like so: C:\\path\\to\\your\\workspace
	"mm_workspace" : "C:\\Users\\mshrivasta002\\Mavensmate",

	//set to desired Salesforce.com API version (tooling api functionality requires 27.0+)
	"mm_api_version" : "28.0",

	//if true, MavensMate will automatically hide the debug panel upon a successful operation
	"mm_hide_panel_on_success" : true,
         --------
         ----------
         -----------------
     }

To create projects just navigate  to Mavensmate>NewProject and a screen comes up to enter credentials and create the project

A sample screen shot on how this comes up is below

The deployment interface is really good as well and works good for chrome browser(Not yet tried with other browsers)

A small screen shot on how this looks is below

The major features that are really significant and give an edge over eclipse are as below

1)Auto complete for the visualforce is supported (In eclipse we may need separate plugins )
2)Debug logs obtained from the server are pretty 
3)Performance and speed of data fetch from server  is not so bad (OK but i feel needs improvement)
4)There are already templates available for most of common scenarios like batch apex,visual force controlers,email services ,etc
5)The tooling API is used and hence everything is JSON based and there are also commands for compiling and creating and editing files  everything can be done from command line .The API documentation is really good

http://mavensmate.com/API/Overview

6)Syntax highlighting is bonus and sublime text editor is really good one .

Frankly speaking a single blog-post is not sufficient but this will just motivate to try this IDE for a change.Happy coding !!!