FlashDevelop vs Yi
When comparing FlashDevelop vs Yi, the Slant community recommends FlashDevelop for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” FlashDevelop is ranked 41st while Yi is ranked 46th. The most important reason people chose FlashDevelop is:
FlashDevelop comes without any cost.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
FlashDevelop comes without any cost.
Pro Haxe development support
FlashDevelop has first-class support for Haxe development, the open source toolkit based on a modern programming language and cross-platform library.
Pro Good code completion
FlashDevelop's code completion is pretty good.
Pro Excellent support for Actionscript 2 and 3 (Flash)
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.
Pro Good number of project templates
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.
Pro XML/HTML completion
FlashDevelop has XML/HTML completion aside from code completion.
Pro .NET Framework 2.0 application
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.
Pro Source-control support (svn, git, mercurial)
Pro Great debugging
FlashDevelop provides very efficient debugging features.
Pro Supports Zen-coding for HTML
This is very useful for carrying out high-speed HTML coding and editing.
Pro Snippets
Pro Tasks/todo
Pro SWF/SWC exploration
Pro Great project compilation
FlashDevelop facilitates project compilation.
Pro Decent code generation
Although the code generation can't really be called top-notch, it's decent and sufficient for most developers.
Pro Combines and improves upon the best text-editing features from your favorite editors
Yi has default configurations for Vim, Emacs, as well as CUA. It also makes several improvements that includes Sublime-like (multiple) cursors.
Pro More performant than Vim
Vim can be rather slow due the age of its code base. In particular, running large macros in Vim can be rather painful. Since Yi is being built from scratch it has been engineered for performance and with the benefit of hindsight.
Pro Extensible and modular editing features
As far as extensibility goes, Yi easily outstrips any other open-source text editor. Motions can be built from parser combinators, making them simultaneously flexible and modular - an open source hacker's dream.
Pro Plugins work together
Packages work together because they compile together.
Cons
Con Windows only
FlashDevelop is for Windows only, and it's not cross-platform either.
Con Haxe debugging is in its infancy
Although FlashDevelop supports breakpoint debugging on Flashplayers, native Haxe applications (C++) can't be easily debugged within FlashDevelop.
Con Very few plugins available
Even though Yi is a general purpose text editor similar to Vim and Emacs, almost all of the plugins that have been written for Yi so far focus on supporting Haskell as a programming environment.
Con No way to reuse your existing customizations and keybindings
If you have spent years crafting your .vimrc
or .emacs
, there's no way to reuse it in Yi. You have to start from scratch.
Con Requires Haskell to compile and configure
GHC + Haskell packages makes for a rather large installation, which is a big ask for a relatively obscure terminal editor.