Visual SlickEdit

Visual SlickEdit is a powerful programmable multi-platform software development editor that is based on SlickEdit and IBM's E3 editor (a predecessor to Enhanced Editor) concept and originally written by some of the same authors.

History
In 1994 MicroEdge introduced Visual SlickEdit for OS/2, an graphical editor that offered much stronger project handling and programming utility features than EPM could offer and with versions two and three of VS in particular offered a host of features not generally available on other editors or only by linking them to external utilities. Some of the features from classic Visual SlickEdit have since disappeared from the modern product. VS was soon after the introduction of v1 ported to Windows and a couple of years later to Unix systems that offered X windows capability. At the same time the company continued to offer the text mode version of SlickEdit for DOS and Unix systems that were discontinued or lacked X Windows capability and later as a lower cost option to Visual Slickedit on modern Unix variants.

While VS sold reasonably on the OS/2 platform it never regained the market share it had before the introduction of EPM, and many OS/2 users remained unaware of its existence. This relative lack of sales lead to version 4.0b being the last one for OS/2.

Currently SlickEdit Inc. offers SlickEdit Pro for Windows Vista and later, Linux, macOS, AIX, HP-UX and Solaris.

The company has from time to time sold versions of the editor designed to integrate into IDEs from other companies, in the 1990s they sold a Borland Delphi and CA Jasmine TND compatible versions of VS, more recently offered a version that integrated into Microsoft's Visual Studio and currently have a version that integrates into Eclipse. In the late 90s the company also made a short stop in the mainframe world with a version of the editor especially tailored to develop S/390 software.

Features
A few features beyond the usual list for programming editors:
 * Project handling
 * File and directory compare (v3.0?)
 * Symbol tagging (fully configurable)
 * Fully configurable compiler/linker error message parser
 * Column awareness (fill, tab, delete etc.)

Versions

 * 1994: 1.0
 * 1994: 1.6
 * 1995: Visual SlickEdit for Unix
 * 1995: 1.7
 * 1996-08-05: 2.0 - (Nov 1996 V2.0 for X Windows)
 * 1996-12-05: 2.0b
 * 2.0c
 * 1997-10-01: 3.0
 * 3.0a
 * 3.0b
 * 1998-12-01: 4.0
 * 1999: 4.0b

Later versions without OS/2 support:
 * 2000: Visual SlickEdit v5.0
 * 2001: Visual SlickEdit v6.0
 * 2002: Visual SlickEdit v7.0
 * 2003: Visual SlickEdit v8.0

Articles

 * Visual SlickEdit 2.0 The EDM/2 Editor Shootout

Publications

 * John Hurst: Professional SlickEdit - Wrox 2007, ISBN 978-0-470-12215-0

Links

 * SlickEdit homepage
 * SlickEdit