SlickEdit is one of the old school editors that has survived the wonder world of the new IDE. Version 10 has just been released and it continues to blur the boundaries between a simple text editor and a fullblown IDE. While there are no visual form designers and other such wizbang graphics, what you get is an editor that you can use for many development tasks, including building, running, and debugging complete applications.
Ten versions down the road, and we now haveĀ almost too many features to list, but let's hit a few of the highlights. You get multiple windows and configurable everything, with colour-coding for all the languages your heart could desire. There is also a variety of language-specific indentation, auto-completion, and code prettification functions designed to save you typing while making your code look right. Add in a slick diff and merge tool, integration with loads of source code control systems (Subversion support is new in this release), searching that lets you use regular expressions or skip strings or comments (or limit your searching to strings or comments, for that matter) or what ever. You get a C-based macro language and just about any keyboard shortcut man (or woman) can imagine. And then there is built-in class and definition browsers making it super-easy and super-fast to jump to parts of your code. So overall SlickEdit is very fast; if you're used to waiting for an IDE to churn, you'll be pleasantly surprised with the responsiveness here.
From there, move on to the actual coding stuff. For example, you can open up a Visual Studio .NET solution directly in SlickEdit v10, build or rebuilt it, run it, even debug it with a full selection of watches, single-stepping, and other advanced debugging features. If you're working in C++ you also get a whole mess of refactoring features in the editor. Java developers get new support for Java Live Errors and the Hot-Swap Debugger (essentially edit and continue for Java), plus the ability to run JUnit tests from within the editor. The user interface has also been modernized from v9, with slicker icons and dockable windows for a more modern feel.
If you want to take the program for a spin, there's a 15-day trial available for download.
Find it here....