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Visual SlickEdit - by Dr. Slump
This is under my opinion the best programmers editor/IDE in the world. If you think that an editor with syntax-highlighting is cool, you haven't seen Visual SlickEdit, it have so many features that after two months of continuous use I'm still learning things about it, and most of them are really cool!
You can find it at www.slickedit.com, it's a fairly expensive program at $299 for a single user license ($99 if you are a student). Perhaps your boss can buy it or you may have it for your birthday.
Current version is 7.01, and is the one I'm reviewing. It's loaded with features, from being cross-platform to advanced code navigation, class tagging or powerful c-like macro language.
Since the moment you run it, you realize that it's not a conventional IDE. The learning curve is hard, but there are lots of wizards to help you configure it to your needs. It does have native support for Delphi, so all you have to worry about is to configure it to support FPC.
The working philosophy of this IDE is based on workspaces and projects. You can even mix different programming languages in a workspace, for example if you are creating a program which uses nasm and FPC, Slickedit will call automatically the proper compiler, and of course will present each file with its correct hi-lighting and code browsing features. All this without the need of painful make files!
If you have the FPC RTL sources you can generate the tags easily. Slickedit will parse the sources for you, the only but is that you'll have to rename the .pp files to .pas, so the IDE will recognize them. Once you've done that the code auto-completion and the class/function reference will work perfectly.
They build in a decent FTP client and a Version Control System (CVS, RCS, SourceSafe...) to keep your project updated easily. There is a console window integrated in the IDE, very useful for debugging. A really nice api documentation editor is also available, which will let you document and access that reference very quick. Yet another useful feature is the selective display, which lets you fold blocks of code for an easier vision of the file.
Another extras are a pretty nice expression evaluator (calc), an ascii table, a spell-checker, an amazingly powerful search engine and a great macro system with support for forms and menus.
This is all-round the best IDE I've work with. It outperforms such beasts as the M$ Visual IDE or Delphi IDE (compared against the source editor).
It's fast, reliable, attractive and easy. Once you try it you can not come back.
The system requirements are fairly low, 16MB Ram and 60mb of hd for a Windows machine. Anyway my guess is that if you want to use all the features, and I'm sure you'll want to, the requirements will be a bit higher.
(c) 2002 Dr.Slump senbei@terra.es
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