When comparing SlickEdit vs Groovy/Grails Tool Suite, the Slant community recommends Groovy/Grails Tool Suite for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs for Grails/Groovy?” Groovy/Grails Tool Suite is ranked 3rd while SlickEdit is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Groovy/Grails Tool Suite is:
GGTS is freely available for use in development and/or internal business operations without any limitations whatsoever.
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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 Freely available
GGTS is freely available for use in development and/or internal business operations without any limitations whatsoever.
Pro Supports development in the cloud through Cloud Foundry
Being able to develop in the cloud means that developers can be distributed and data can be stored in the cloud. With a variety of databases available for use in the cloud, programmers will surely find a suitable solution.
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 Dismissed by Pivotal
Pivotal announced that it will fund the next two major releases of the Groovy and Grails through March 31st, 2015, after which it will no longer directly fund development on these open source projects.
Con Can be extremely resource intensive
High usage of resources lead to screen freezes and program crashes. The worst case is losing hours of work due to the program failure.