A Comprehensive Unix Development Suite
By Nathan Boeger
Unix development teems with passionate, personal preferences for using tried and true tools. Most developers I know use vi or Emacs for most, if not all of their coding. Visual SlickEdit is one of the older and better-known Unix development suites around, so it's available for most Unices. This is a great advantage because you can use it on any supported Unix/Linux or even Windows system, and for the most part, your code looks the same. This lets multiple programmers work on a single project regardless of their chosen platforms.
For this review, I looked at the Linux and Solaris versions of Visual SlickEdit 6.0. This product's system requirements are minimal, which is rare in a modern software package. The installation was very easy and mostly text-based. After the installation, you only need to add /usr/lib/vslick/bin/ to your path, and you're off and running. (Side note: Even though FreeBSD isn't commercially supported, I was able to install Visual SlickEdit 6.0 and get it to run under FreeBSD's Linux compat. Just make sure that you properly run brandelf on the binaries when you do this.)
I spent a few minutes playing around with the editor and its tool bars. The tool bars are dockable, which makes it easy to add more tool bars and buttons without cluttering the editing environment. Most of these are highly configurable also. I easily created my own buttons, complete with shell commands, and my own icons.
