I don’t know if I even need to explain why I don’t use the Flash IDE but I will for reasons I don’t know. I think Macromedia/Adobe had just given up on improving the Flash Actionscript Panel because there were so many AS editors out there that most people were using that they just figured people would use them instead. These AS editors that are out their are basically their to just make our lives a little easier. And they do it well. I’m sure when Flash CS3 comes out they will likely combine some of the new dreamweaver coding stuff but thats about it. Not enough to lure back most of us F9 haters.
I’ve been using Sepy for almost 2 years now and I love using it. I couldn’t imagine going back to the Flash Actions Panel. EEK! Some things I like about Sepy… snippets, workspace pannel, abbreviations, custom keyboard shortcuts, quick find, quick line comment, line duplication, line deletion. I use those things all the time, but it even has a lot of stuff that I don’t use or just haven’t figured out their benefits. Actually, it has a MTASC funtion to it that I would love to get working but I can’t seem to figure out how to set it up. Not sure what’s up with that. Someday I might try again.
I know their are a number of other editors out their that are pretty wicked as well, namely, eclipse and jedit. I haven’t really messed around with them too much but as we all know its hard for a developer to get on-board with a new way of doing things once they have a system down. With that said, what’s your favorite Actionscript editor and why?
January 6th, 2007 at 12:17 am
I am also a long time Sepy user, but recently I was playing around with other editors. I found I really liked Eclipse, but its a bit of a resource pig. Personally I thought JEdit sucked, felt like I took a step back in time using that old clunker. Plus there wasn’t a huge Flash community using JEdit so I couldn’t find any useful plugins unlike Eclipse. Another great editor is FlashDevelop 2.0, worth checking out, it has the one feature I wish Sepy had, you can double click on an imported class and it opens it up.
P.S. Nice site. Looks like I’ll soon have some competition in the rankings.
January 26th, 2007 at 1:03 am
FlashDevelop has obviously a richer/smarter AS2 & AS3/MXML code completion.
February 15th, 2007 at 10:18 am
I love SE|PY! I did try Eclipse, JEdit and a few others for awhile bacause SE|PY did not work for the Mac at the time I bought mine. The latest release now supports Mac so I have ditched those other editors and I am now 100% SE|PY again.
June 16th, 2007 at 8:59 am
I use SE|PY too, even if it’s got way too many bugs in the Mac version. Seems like the best option around though. Hoping for a more rapidly updated version of this app for Mac!
June 30th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
I use Sepy but I am disappointed that there isn’t a Linux version of it yet. Specially as it’s advertised as a multi-platform (Win/OSx/Linux) editor .
July 23rd, 2007 at 11:25 am
I used to use SE|PY but the bugs on mac are just too many. It was crashing almost as much as it was stable. It seems as if it has been given up on. Said cause it was the best. I use Xcode and am mostly happy with that. I am trying out DreamWeaver CS3 as an alt. I would prefer to use FlashDevelop over all of them, but needing to have Parallels open is just too much of a res-hog. If someone that was devoted to building SE|PY would come along and continue it I would return. For now, I am wandering between two opinions.
July 27th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I have found Textmate to be a nice alternative to sepy on the mac. At least you can hit apple enter to compile your swf from Textmate.
November 12th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Personally I used Sepy for about two months and then switched to FlashDevelop. Maybe was a personal configuration but Sepy crashed to often on my machine.
December 4th, 2007 at 7:24 am
i loved SEPY, but having upgraded to CS3 i don’t use it as they don’t itegrate well.
big pity – can’t afford FDT and am in a dual platform environment, so can’t use FlashDevelop….
back to the Flash IDE i guess
June 23rd, 2008 at 3:48 pm
I used SE|PY years ago when I was first fed up with the Actions panel. It kept injecting phantom characters to the beginnings of my files, which would break compilation.
So I moved to ASDT/Eclipse. Worked great until CS3 came out. Since then, I’ve been in FlashDevelop. FlashDevelop is sweet.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:10 am
I, personally, think that SE|PY just SUCKS BIGTIME. I can’t even use the second most vital feature of a decent script editor, which is, to be able to use the numpad (the most vital feature is to be able to use the rest of the keyboard). I have tried absolutly everything, I’ve searched every website google can come up with about this problem and I’ve even tried to edit the shortcuts so it’ll type in the number “1″ when I press “1″. Nothing is working, and I’m running out of hope, I’ve been trying to make this thing work because all the other features are amazing. So, if your a guy who doesn’t use the numpad (who doesn’t?) then I recommend SE|PY, but if you DO use numpad, then I recommend just about EVERYTHING else.
SE|PY, from my point of view, is without any circumstances the worst script editor I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:23 am
btw, my numpad works with almost every other application and this problem is not as simple as “the num-lock is on”. If anyone knows what’s wrong then please tell me. I use a mac mini 1.5 Ghz power PC, Mac OS X Tiger, my keyboard is from apple, and it’s the old type with bumped keys (not those nearly flat keys on the new apple keyboards).
thanks.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Since I switched to a mac I now use TextMate and love it way better than any editor I have ever used. You can create your own macro events by recording different things you do and then assign key strokes to repeat that behavior. It has a lot of great features including built in subversion commands.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:23 pm
You might also find that Coda is a nice alternative for a mac based editor. It is great for working with an entire site and handles built in ftp. It was created more for entire websites including css, php, javascript, html and the like. But it also has fairly a decent actionscript implementation.
April 21st, 2010 at 12:54 pm
This is a great post. Thank you for sharing this informative post.