Back in 2016, I wrote a post here about how the Force.com IDE was making an epic comeback, with support for Lightning. At the time I was very excited to see that Salesforce was refocusing it’s efforts towards improving that tool in the form of a Beta. Even though the Force.com IDE was the original tool that Salesforce offered and it had a long history with the development community, it had failed to keep up with the bevy of tools now being offered by third-parties.
Fast forward to today and the recent announcement by Salesforce that the Force.com IDE Beta has been officially discontinued.
So where does that leave Salesforce developers?
Well, not as bad as you might think. Salesforce is not giving up on supporting a local IDE. Nor are they giving up on the original version of the Force.com IDE (at least not just yet). So far, only the new Beta will be discontinued.
It is just that they are focusing their efforts towards improvement of the Salesforce Extensions for Visual Studio (VS) Code. It just made no sense to support two tools and after analyzing feedback from the Beta of the Force.com IDE, the team had to make a clear choice and Salesforce Extensions for VS Code came up the winner.
I personally prefer Visual Studio Code and there is no question that it is easier to install than Eclipse (which was always a bit of a nightmare imho with all the required Java installs it required). I also like how intuitive it is and that I can use it to do all sorts of other modern development. If there is a popular modern language out there, you can safely bet that VS Code supports it.
If you have not had a chance to check it out yet, I highly suggest you do so and just remember to keep an open mind.
Also, be aware that Salesforce Extensions for VS Code does not yet support everything that the Force.com IDE does. Like I said earlier, the original Force.com IDE is not going away, just the newer Beta version which included support for Salesforce DX and Lightning. It is going to take some time for the development team to get all the features that the Force.com IDE offers into Salesforce Extensions for VS Code.
But keep in mind, that VS Code is where they are headed, so if you have not yet checked out Visual Studio Code, now is the perfect time to do so. I think you will be pleasantly surprised and impressed with it.
And let me know what you think…
saramorgan.net 
Hey Sara, so I have a question here . While force.com ide on ecllipse did support egit where we could easily push our code to get/ bit bucket branches , will there be any such support from visual studio code???
Yes, VS Code is fully integrated with Git using the Salesforce extensions. You may want to checkout this video https://www.salesforce.com/video/1768045/
Looking at the current statement, it seems the same is true for original Force.com IDE as well and not just for Beta version. But does that mean it is a complete shutdown and we wont be able to use it after the official support ends. I understand they wont entertain any of the issues related to it but can I still develop code using it?
I think it is fine for you to continue using the IDE for your development efforts, as long as you are ok that they are not addressing any issues or adding any new functionality.
JetForcer – The Smartest Salesforce IDE (https://jetforcer.com/)
JetForcer is a powerful plugin for Salesforce development with JetBrains IDEs, feel free to try it out.