SciTE vs FlashDevelop

It's property files allow for fine tweaks of its behavior, at a global or per language / project level. These textual settings might be confusing for those used to preference dialogs, but prove to be powerful, flexible, and fine grained.

With less than 2 MB of binary on Windows, SciTE starts instantly. Plus, if you don't need all the config, syntax files, blah, there's a 678k standalone .exe version. Nothing is going to beat that for lightweight and start-up times. Stick it in a folder that is already on your PATH.

Based on the Scintilla source code editor, SciTE has some advanced features like rectangular editing, simple regular expression search and replace, code folding, etc. It allows the user to launch a compiler or interpreter, and it can also interpret the error messages, jumping at the location they point to.

Lua scripting is key to SciTE's power and flexibility. The Lua scripting language can be used to perform complex text transformations. It's relatively simple syntax and its large user-base makes it a great choice for a scripting feature.

The console window can show the result of ran commands (like build current file, reporting warnings, and errors), but also accept interactive shell commands.

SciTE works on Windows and Linux, and it also has a commercial port on MacOS.

Lexers providing folding and syntax highlighting are based on code, not on regular expressions. They support context, nesting, special rules, etc.

SciTE is written in C++, with lot of contributors, both to the core and to the numerous lexers.

Has a simple graphical user interface

FlashDevelop comes without any cost.

FlashDevelop has first-class support for Haxe development, the open source toolkit based on a modern programming language and cross-platform library.

FlashDevelop's code completion is pretty good.

Although everyone claims Flash is dead, it's still quite useful for game developers due to its rapid compile and run times, as well as its great debugging functionality with FlashDevelop.

While it's project template system is not the best compared to it's competitors, it still is decent and is a good way to generate some boilerplate code.

FlashDevelop has XML/HTML completion aside from code completion.

It's windows only, but has tremendous support from plugin developers and a dedicated team that's been developing it for close to 10 years.

FlashDevelop provides very efficient debugging features.

This is very useful for carrying out high-speed HTML coding and editing.

FlashDevelop facilitates project compilation.

Although the code generation can't really be called top-notch, it's decent and sufficient for most developers.