When comparing FlashDevelop vs SlickEdit, the Slant community recommends SlickEdit for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” SlickEdit is ranked 23rd while FlashDevelop is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose SlickEdit is:
There are powerful symbol analysis features in SlickEdit, including context tagging and references.
Specs
Question 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 Symbol analysis support
There are powerful symbol analysis features in SlickEdit, including context tagging and references.
Pro Extensive support for programming languages
SlickEdit supports over 50 programming languages on nine platforms.
Pro Integrated debuggers for multiple languages
Integrated debuggers for GNU C++, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, and PHP.
Pro Built-in beautifier
The beautifier formats code as you type to help improve readability and consistency.
Pro Compiler tools
Pro Over 13 emulations
Choose from fifteen keyboard emulations, containing the key bindings and behaviors necessary to emulate other editors (e.g., CUA, Vim, GNU Emacs, etc.)
Pro Multi-Platform
Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86
Pro Portable mode
Possibility to set up a portable installation, to run on a USB drive for example.
Pro Scriptable
Write custom macro commands, functions, dialogs and tool windows.
Pro Easy access to XCode projects
SlickEdit opens XCode projects with no conversions needed.
Pro Third party tool integration
Pro Easy access to Visual Studio workspace
SlickEdit opens Visual Studio workspace with no conversions needed.
Pro Popular version control system
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.