When comparing FlashDevelop vs SlickEdit, the Slant community recommends FlashDevelop for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” FlashDevelop is ranked 36th while SlickEdit is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose FlashDevelop is:
FlashDevelop comes without any cost.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
FlashDevelop comes without any cost.
Pro Good code completion
FlashDevelop's code completion is pretty good.
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 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 Built-in beautifier
The beautifier formats code as you type to help improve readability and consistency.
Pro Integrated debuggers for multiple languages
Integrated debuggers for GNU C++, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, and PHP.
Pro Compiler tools
Pro Third party tool integration
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 Over 13 emulations
Pro Easy access to XCode projects
SlickEdit opens XCode projects with no conversions needed.
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.