WynApse

Thanks for the kind mention in your recent blog. It’s very hard to compare editors since we are usually more familiar with one than the others. So, I thought I’d point out a few places where SlickEdit provides more of what you like in Source Insight than you thought.

Search results are a normal text window—SlickEdit has had this feature for a very long time. When you run a search, simply place a checkmark in “Output to editor window”. Each search will create a new window, giving you all the benefits you are accustomed to.

Case intelligent syllable-based winnowing—you gave us credit for performing a degree of syllable matching, though I’m not sure that’s accurate. We offer completions and symbol searching. Completions are case-insensitive and work like most systems, matching at the beginning of the string. Syllable matching appears to match within the string, which is something our completions don’t do. Our symbol search does offer this, but does not use capitalization or other delimiters to recognize symbols. This is an interesting idea and we’ll have to look into it. While some of our operations are synchronous, it’s rare for us to have the kind of performance issues you noted. I’d be curious to learn more about the operation you performed so we can better understand what went wrong.

The Context Window—the closest matching feature in SlickEdit is the Preview tool window. It displays the definition of the symbol at the current cursor location—no need to highlight anything. This view is tied into pretty much every other tool window that displays symbols, providing a very quick mechanism to view the definition of the symbol without having to open a buffer. For ad hoc lookups, you would use the Find Symbol tool window, which allows you to type in symbols and find matches. The results are also tied to the preview, allowing you to step through the list of matches and preview each definition.

Smart Reference Matching—I think the feature that is the best analog here isn’t our Color Coded searching but our References tool window. It will find all of the occurrences of the selected symbol and, where possible, limit the results to the matching context, such as the case you mentioned with two classes with the same method name. The Color Coded search is a purely textual tool that does not rely on the Context Tagging engine for matching.

Matched Symbol Color Coding—there are many approaches to color coding. As you noted, many do not work well with code that can’t compile. This was one of the chief goals when we designed ours. We do offer Live Errors for Java, which will compile your code in the background and highlight errors, but this is not part of our color coding engine.

File History and Auto Recovery—we offer the same capabilities in SlickEdit. We also have a feature called Backup History that creates a local version each time you save. With this you can view previous versions of your file even if they have not been checked into source control. Since projects often limit checkins until code is compilable or finished, this gives you a more fine-grained version history.

Project Add/Remove Files—SlickEdit offers two mechanisms to do this: 1) the project-add-file command will add the current buffer to the project. 2) If you select File > Save As from the main menu, you can put a check in “Add to project”.

Sorry, I got my comments cross posted this morning. The previous comment was for a different blog.

Now for something more contextual: thanks for checking us out. We have added a lot in the last 6 versions. Our website has a list of Cool Features, many of which were introduced or enhanced since version 7: http://www.slickedit.com/content/view/353/217.