On Tuesday (May 22, 2007), Mika Palmu, Philippe Elsass, and Nick Farina made an alpha release of the next installment of my favorite ActionScript editor, FlashDevelop. Somehow, I missed that they released the beta last night!
I tip my hat to the guys that made it. Considering it’s a free editor, it’s pretty darn good. I have a few rants and items on my wish list that I’ll get into in a moment; but all in all, these guys could easily sell this product and yet they offer it for free. I’m surprised Adobe hasn’t hired them to save their horrible IDE in Flash CS3 (yeah, yeah, it’s improved… but for a company of their size and the number of years that Flash has under its belt, it should be significantly better than it is). Anyway, if you like and actively use the product, you should support them. If you are still using the Flash IDE to write your code, please, make your life easier and install FlashDevelop.
There is finally expanded keyboard shortcut support to allow utilization of keys such as ALT and PageDown.
Viewing multiple code files simultaneously in a split screen mode is even easier which can be seen here:
The Find & Replace is much better than it was in v2, but I wish it had a “replace within selection” option…
The code snippets have all been moved to individual external files. The best part is that they are now language specific! This means that I can have two different snippets, with the same name, but with completely different functionality depending on the language that I’m currently working in. There are a few $(EntryPoint) parameter oddities within snippets, but I expect they will fix this before the final release. Unfortunately, my biggest desire for FlashDevelop, more than anything else, still hasn’t been implemented. That is support for custom snippet parameters that can be changed in a popup dialog on the fly with default values. The SE|PY ActionScript IDE (also a great editor done by Alessandro Crugnola) has offered this feature for quite a while. See the screen shot below for how it works:
Configuring many FlashDevelop settings (but not all) or installed plugins is much easier with the new settings GUI:
The code completion is outstanding. The crash recovery seems to work fairly well (but I noticed a couple of oddities). The new integrated browser works okay, but it is in dire need of forward and back buttons (I wouldn’t even use this browser if it weren’t for the one click access it has to the online FlashDevelop documentation wiki).
All in all, FD is still my favorite (free) AS editor, and FD3 is a nice next step. If they add support for custom snippets, I would be as happy as Google was to locate E.T.
