I know the Best Thing Ever Awards aren’t due for another 6 months or so, but frankly it’s going to take something pretty darned spectacular to be SlickEdit in the category of Best Linux Application Ever. Basically, it’s Visual Studio, but for Linux. For the last 8 months or so, I’ve been developing using a sort of cobbled together not-very-integrated environment consisting mainly of gvim (which is still wonderful, incidentally, just not for writing large C++ projects), gcc and gdb. This is a somewhat painful process for someone used to the Visual Studio F7-to-build, F5-to-debug, all in one development environment – and yes, I know you can use things like ctags and get gcc to output its errors to a buffer in gvim; I tried it, and it made me want to stick pins in my eyes. It just didn’t work.

Fortunately, it seems that the developers of SlickEdit felt the same way, and have basically copied Visual Studio and brought it across to Linux (and Solaris, Irix, MacOS, Windows and nearly every other OS in the world). It’s like scales falling from my eyes. I’ve got a classbrowser. I’ve got integrated debugging. I’ve got compile errors I can click on that take me to the appropriate place in the code. Tab completion. Code refactoring. The works. It’s wonderful. Unfortunately, it’s also $284 a seat, so I’ve got some persuading of the people who hold the purse strings to do, but hopefully the increased productivity (if today is anything to go by, anyway) should make it more than worth it. The fact I can do all my coding/compiling/debugging from within a single environment makes life so much easier and I’m not having to constantly make mental leaps between applications so my workflow is much smoother.

There’s a 15 day trial on the website if you fancy trying it out, too. I heartily recommend it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.