My months-long Goldilocks-like search for a decent AS code editors recently came to a blissful conclusion here:
I was in a long, bad marriage to the Flash editor, which I couldn't leave, because I was on OS X and the alternatives were buggy (the SEPY port to Mac, ASDT in Eclipse), expensive (FDT) or undeveloped (XCode, FAMES).
Reading about FlashDevelop (here) pushed me over the OS X edge: I got hold of a copy of VirtualPC, downloaded FlashDevelop (and the Microsoft.NET framework, which installation requires) and began coding…
The experience was trance-like. Now I understand why people get so attached to their editors. This one has all the usual features (code completion, class libraries) plus the almighty F4: press F4 while your cursor is over a word, and the editor brings you back to its origin (function or variable declaration or class definition), automatically opening files if necessary.
Typically coders laud editors because they save them time; FlashDevelop made me rethink their acccolades.
How much clock time does it actually take to scroll back to a functon declaration or open a class file? Yes, it adds up, but does it compare even remotely to the time you spend rubbing your temples or scribbling diagrams?
Rather tools like FlashDevelop make you more efficient by automating tasks that other otherwise interrupt the flow of your thoughts. They allow you to concentrate purely on the task at hand–the programming logic, for instance, not that ugly heap of conditional brackets.
More generally, the need for speed should be understood as a need to think clearly. The speed of Google helps me think: What are the best search terms? What, exactly, am I looking for? Conversely, waiting for a sluggish program to open up, I lose more than a few seconds, I lose the time it takes to re-establish my train of thought (if I can at all…I'm easily confused).
Random exasperation: swfs could be faster and more intuitive than html pages, so why are they almost uniformly slower?
Tags: speed · workflow · code3 Comments
3 responses so far ↓
Flashdevelop is the single most important piece of open source software yet created for the flash community.
On the mac I love Textmate…but I find myself booting into Bootcamp simply to code actionscript in flashdevelop
Yes–FlashDevelop is a life-saver.
I eventually got a MacIntel notebook and set up Bootcamp and then FlashDevelop on it. That made life easier, since VirtualPC was balky to say the least.
But the story continues. I was working on FlashDevelop using Keith Peter’s AS3 template files and Ant builder until the trial for Flex Builder 2 came out. Now I’m on Eclipse, which is more full-featured for AS3 development, obviously…but I’ll be switching back to FlashDevelop as soon as possible. Eclipse is about as balky as VirtualPC, even on my PowerMac. It’s aggravating as all hell.
My dearest hope is that FlashDevelop 3.0 will come out before the trial runs out.
I’m pretty new to this whole game and yeah, before Flash Develop… it wasn’t pretty. Getting some projects converted over to MTASC inside of Flash Develop can be a challenge but it’s worth it. There are still some things that can’t be used directly simply because MTASC is more strict than Flash. Then you have to do the dance of compiling in Flash and referencing it within FlashDevelop sometimes without setting the type so that MTASC doesn’t try to go into the code… But it works and it’s cool. Very much so.
Eclipse will get another shot again soon though. I had tried a couple of years ago, and have recently downloaded it again. In fact, I just installed the AMES set up but it’ll be a little bit before I get that up and running. Flash Develop is just more intuitive so far.