When comparing SlickEdit vs Aptana Studio, the Slant community recommends SlickEdit for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript IDEs or editors?” SlickEdit is ranked 35th while Aptana Studio is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose SlickEdit is:
SlickEdit supports over 50 programming languages on nine platforms.
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Pros
Pro Extensive support for programming languages
SlickEdit supports over 50 programming languages on nine platforms.
Pro Built-in beautifier
The beautifier formats code as you type to help improve readability and consistency.
Pro Compiler tools
Pro Scriptable
Write custom macro commands, functions, dialogs and tool windows.
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 Extensive configuration options
Pro Easy access to Visual Studio workspace
SlickEdit opens Visual Studio workspace with no conversions needed.
Pro Symbol analysis support
There are powerful symbol analysis features in SlickEdit, including context tagging and references.
Pro Integrated debuggers for multiple languages
Integrated debuggers for GNU C++, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, and PHP.
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 Easy access to XCode projects
SlickEdit opens XCode projects with no conversions needed.
Pro Third party tool integration
Pro Popular version control system
Pro Available in standalone and Eclipse plugin versions
Aptana Studio has standalone (130.7 MB for Windows) and Eclipse-plugin versions.
Pro HTML5-aware code assist
Aptana's code assist displays which tags are supported by which browsers.
Pro Support for web projects
Aptana was specifically created for web application development. It supports a variety of languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby.
Pro Built-in terminal
Has a built-in terminal emulator from which you can run commands.
Pro Free and open source
Aptana is available for free under the GPL license with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Git integration
Aptana provides integrated support for Git to make collaboration and version control easier.
Cons
Con No command line option
This is a visual only editor
Con It's kinda slow
If you have a very large project or tag database, it can hang the UI.
Con Many dependencies
Aptana has a couple of dependencies to keep in mind.
It is built with Java and and has some requirements for the JDK version.
Aptana requires Git, and Eclipse 3.5+ if you are installing it as an Eclipse plugin.
Con No longer updated
Language support is increasingly dated.