Yep, it's been an entire week of
SlickEdit 2009 here at my desk.
The only time I opened version 7 was to compare a macro. And, I've not had to change a macro for 4 workdays.
Things I've had to learn:
- Stop backspacing over things you want to remove... word left and nuke to end of line avoids whatever the template editing is doing.
- Jumping to a bookmark no longer takes an enter key. Ctrl-J followed by the number or name and you're there
- Make friends with the file open tab and the search tab. I actually really like both those features. Since I was using a somewhat prehistoric version, I'm not sure when the new File Open window was added, but I like typing F:\ (enter) and having it immediately open to those files, then partial-text entering gets me to where I'm going fast.
- Pull my head out about macros... described below
Macro Info
I'm not totally in love with the 'record a macro' 'play back a macro' scenario in 2009, but I have a way around it.
It's my opinion it should just work, but it doesn't for everything.
If you view->source on my blog for any of the SilverlightCream entries, you'll see a dt/dd sequence with hyperlink, title, etc. I use a macro to build that for me, and it seems to me that if I am in a file with an html extension and I record some html, then I should be able to play it back, and that isn't working... well, it works, but it doesn't play back what I did because the playback gets confused with the template editing (my opinion).
But... I can make it work. Since I'm overly familiar with the macro source file, I just pop open vusermacs.e after recording something. I remove all the "last_event(name2event(" things and replace it with just keyin's of what I was trying to do. I'm keying in < and > separate to trick the editor into not knowing it's a tag also.
I reworked an OpenLine() macro I had used since forever to use keyin_enter() and am also using that by itself when I want a newline in the target.
I got much smarter about trying to place items by setting bookmarks as I go and then jump to the bookmark rather than make assumption about cursor_up for x lines because the number of lines changes based on other things the template editing does. This was probably the biggest cause of my failures last time and early this go-around.
Macros, particularly the large ones, play back really slow. Again, I think this is the template editing getting confused with the playback. I think I'd be stupendously happy if I could suspend the template editing during playback, or between two markers in a macro maybe. Mostly what I'm doing is just slapping in C#, html, xaml, or xml that I've debugged already, so I don't need the template to be trying to help.
General Setup/Useability
Because we're talking about a big macro engine here, the possibilities are endless. In the past, I've always tweaked and tweaked on the color settings. I'm old-school and with glaucoma I like green on black. SnowWhite may have gotten along with the dwarves, but that background just makes my eyes tired. Out of the box, they have a few darker themes and I am using the standard Mocha. The only change I've made is I switched the font to Consolas 12 because like it or not, I'm older, and this is very visible.
The IntelliSense is great, and even builds up descriptions from my header comments on code I've written. Would be nice if there were some refactoring built-in like "Extract Method", but I've got VS for that.
Having both editors around is really best of both worlds. I bring in one of the old aspx files to Visual Studio, do Ctrl-E, Ctrl-D and it not only makes it pretty but it deals with a lot of the case issues for compatibility. Then I open it in SlickEdit and run macros to add / at the end of some tags, and make global boilerplate changes very fast.
Bottom Line
We're friends now. A little bit of compromise and it was back to the business at hand. And that's just me... there are tons of features that I haven't looked into yet.
Don't take my word though... check it out for yourself!