Visual SlickEdit for OS-X

⚠️ 📜 This is archival content from many years or even decades ago. Links may not work. Images may be broken and my opinions may very likely have changed. Please do not judge the content here too harshly.

| | | jduprey | September 23rd, 2004

Current Mood: happy

The people at SlickEdit have released Visual SlickEdit for OS-X. I’ve used SlickEdit for many years on Solaris and Linux. Its the best C++ IDE I’ve found for ‘NIX platforms. It has features similar to Microsoft’s Visual Studio. It really excels in its contextual parser (tagger) which provides contextual hints while you are coding and makes it easy to jump to the right spot in your code. If you work on large projects and don’t have a photographic memory, this is a very useful feature.

The Mac version looks identical to the Solaris and Linux versions. That’s because its still an X-Window application. I was somewhat disappointed to hear this. I was drooling at the thought of a Carbon/Cocoa SlickEdit with all its candy-coated goodness. Still, better to have an X-Window version now, than wait even longer for a full-on Mac version.

For those Mac users out there that code, I recommend you try it out. You’ll have to RTFM because there are a lot of features you’ll miss otherwise. Most features are configurable. I particularly like the code beautifier which is pretty customizable.

The down side is the price. Its $270.00 (US) + $60.00 (US) per year of maintenance. That’s pretty steep if you aren’t a commercial developer. I forked over the dough for the Linux version several years ago but I’m not so sure I’ll do it for this Mac version. I plan to give XCode one last go, but I’m not crazy about its editing power or its code completion. The up side to SlickEdit’s price tag is that the $60/year gets you all upgrades/fixes/support for the year.

SlickEdit also runs on Windows. I personally think they should switch their GUI to TrollTech’s QT. QT is used by KDE and many cross-platform apps. Right now, it looks like they are using Motif or perhaps their own GUI lib.

Has anyone found a better cross-platform (or at least ‘NIX-based) complete IDE for C++? If you’re a Java developer, Eclipse is one of the best IDE’s around - followed by NetBeans. No?

Here are some screen shots of the Mac version of SlickEdit:

*[September 23rd, 2004]: 2004-09-23T00:33:00+03:00