SlickEdit 2008 Week 2
Even though there's been no disposition on the macro issue -- and it IS a big issue to code up, I'm sure -- I'm trying to use SE2008 as much as possible to get a feel for it in general. There's differences, and there's goodness, some things you just find accidentally.
For instance, just now I was deleting characters using the backspace key, and was getting ready to type something uppercase, and whoa... shift-backspace puts characters back... cool... not sure if V7 did that or not... I'm guessing not since I just noticed it now :)
With the newer versions of Visual Studio, I find myself using SlickEdit differently than I did when it first came out. At first it was the only game in town for a good editor with intellisense, and all that, but then Visual Studio caught up in some respects, so SlickEdit becomes the "Pro From Dover", for me. I use it to fill in the blanks in areas that I feel the Visual Studio editor falls down, or for things that either wouldn't work in VS, or would be more trouble than they're worth.
One big thing I use Slick Edit for is searching across my system. I use the Find in Files function and point it at the root of my project, or sometimes I'll just point it at the base folder for ALL my projects and search for something in either the .aspx or .cs files. This still works great in SE2008, but the UI is a bit different.
I'm used to doing Alt-F5 to open the find box, type what I want, or accept what's there from the previous search, then hit Alt-U for Files/Buffers. Well, that changed a bit, because everything is on that one dialog, with tabs for Find in Files, Replace, and Replace in Files. So I have to retrain myself to hit the Find in Files tab.
In V7 the search results showed up in another window, and I had written a macro to pop that out for me to see it quickly.
In SE2008, the search results go to an 'Output' window that is docked at the bottom very similar to VS. I wasn't sure about that at first, since I'm used to it being full-screen, but found I could easily double-click the caption on it, and undock it to get it larger to use, then double-click it back to it's docked position. I like that... it keeps that window out of the chain of edit windows I have open.
On a similar subject, there is a File toolbar that puts up 'tabs' for all files open, also similar to Visual Studio. I'm still using it, we'll see how that goes. I'm not a big fan in VS of having to scroll through that list, and really like being able to hit Alt-B in SE to pop the a file list up, and that still works :)
So, no complaints today... just learning to use the new features.
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