I use SlickEdit and it has many pros (super flexible) and a few cons (price).
The reasons I use SlickEdit:
- it runs on both Linux and Windows (and Mac, but I don't use that)
- has fantastic code navigation (I think that only Visual Studio with Visual Assist is better)
- it performs very well - much better than Eclipse the last time I tried it
- supports pretty much every language that's even close to mainstream, often including debugging
- is very customizable - most of SlickEdit's functionality is implemented using the C like SlickC scripting language, so if you want to hack away at those scripts or write your own you can make the editor behave pretty much however you want
- support is quite good
the downsides:
- SlickEdit is not cheap, and you pretty much want to be on their maintenance plan since they don't seem to offer any significant upgrade discounts. Note that even the initial purchase doesn't get you a year of maintenance - you have to add that on to the initial purchase. Maintenance is an annual cost of 20% of the price of whatever bundle you have - so $60 for a single user/single platform license. Note that even though I'm complaining about it, I think it's worth it and pay the annual maintenance.
- learning the SlickC scripting/macro language can be a significant effort - one that I haven't really invested in. They have extensive documentation, but it's a big enough language/environment that I've only done the simplest of things because I just don't want to invest the time and effort. So there are things I'd like to behave differently, and I'm sure I could get the behavior I want with some SlickC scripts, but I don't. I guess this is kind of a false downside, since if the editor weren't so scriptable I wouldn't even have the option.
As an example of how well SlickEdit supports languages, the first time I set up a C language project on the Linux SlickEdit installation (admittedly it was just a small test project to see how things worked), all I did was tell it the project was a C project and added a file or two to the project. When I built the project I was surprised to find that it just built - SlickEdit had automatically found where all the tools were and it just built. Then I kicked off a debug session, and the same thing - I didn't have to do any manual configuration. It just started gdb and launched the program in it. I was actually stunned - the only other editor that I had that kind of experience with was Visual Studio, and it sort of has to do that since it comes with and installs the entire toolchain and is more or less designed to work only with that toolchain.
One niggley detail that drives me crazy is that while SlickEdit supports multiple instances of the editor running at the same time, when you close an instance it complains about not being able to write the configuration file if the instance being closed isn't the last one. That means any options you've modified in that instance will be lost, which is a drag, but it's also just plain irritating. The error dialogs occur even when you haven't changed any options - I guess because it cant write information about the workspace that's open or something. They've indicated that they'll fix this at some point, but because it has to do with some deep-seated details on their configuration handling it's not an easy fix and there's no timeline for it. There are various workarounds such as specifying a separate configuration file for each instance, but those workarounds have their own drawbacks.
But the bottom line is that I would pay for SlickEdit again if I had to, and I sort of do in the form of the annual maintenance.
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