Wednesday, June 28, 2006

SlickEdit - Mouse Free Development

I use SlickEdit whenever I can for all hardcore editing tasks, including C#, NAnt and batch files. I still go to Visual Studio for debugging and Forms design.
SlickEdit is not a good choice if you're trying to save cash, but for someone like me that codes all day, its simply the best IMHO.

I don't use its ability to load VS projects. I create my own SlickEdit workspaces and projects, and in the Project tools I call a actions.bat file with arguments such as /build and /run.
"actions /build" calls NAnt with the task.
Then I have key shortcuts to launch builds. SlickEdit provides Ctrl-Shift-Up/Down arrow to skip between error locations as reported by most compilers.
I do most development using a modified NUnit runner, and runtime progress is reported in a XML file that appears in Slickedit after a run.

All up, I can edit, compile, fix errors and run without leaving slickedit or touching the mouse.

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