If you haven’t checked out FlashDevelop, I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s a lightweight Flash editor written in C#, and I recently switched to it for all my AS2 development. Don’t get me wrong, I like Eclipse a lot, and it allowed me a lot of freedom compared to the main Flash IDE, but after playing with FD for a while, Eclipse feels like a 500 ton elephant. FD is quick, and includes most of the features a developer using FAMES is used to.

Code completion is my top required feature before I touch any IDE. FlashDevelop allows you to not only set specific directories to include, but any .as file you open will automatically be handled by the ASCompletion plugin. Other nice default plugins include one that will capture and display trace output, and one that checks code with MTASC and highlights any errors right in the editor. A project-related plugin is in development that integrates with Swfmill and allows you to add items to the library by right-clicking on the file in the project file system tree. Of course, this plugin also expands MTASC support by making many features part of the GUI. Another plugin by the same author allows you to view swf files right in the IDE. Great for MTASC developers so that they don’t have to open another program.

I’m so impressed with the progress that FD has made that I’ve joined the action. I’m working on a plugin that allows you to search and display the main Flash Help files in FD–or, if they don’t exist on the user’s system, search the online LiveDocs from Google. That’s why things have been so quiet around here lately. You can expect me to announce the first release of the FlashHelp plugin soon. If you know a little C#, you could donate a little time to make this cool editor better. I’d definitely like to see things like Subversion and cvs plugins, and more integration with other Flash tools.