It’s a shame when a potentially good product is tarnished by someone’s lack of ethics.

Apparently the choice of the tool has a lot to do with personal preferences, and any discussion about which tool is better will end up being fruitless. Everyone will go away convinced that that he is right, and others wrong.

I happen to like FDT – because of its rich set of features, but also because it is based on Eclipse, that I feel very comfortable with. That is my personal preference.

I worked with FlashDevelop and I greatly appreciate the effort of the team to build this editor and distribute it for free. I would recommend FD to anyone today, especially to people that want to start developing AS3. However it misses some features that are crucial for me – a reasonable support for projects with multiple SWFs being one of them.

I worked with FlexBuilder only once, and never even saw TextMate (I am a PC :), so I can’t really say much about those two. But thanks to everyone for your comments!

Have a project that uses XML, AS, PHP, etc…. No prob, every language has equal support.

you definalty cant say that about FDT and Eclipse

And it’s 58 bucks

You can use Ctrl+Enter to compile in FlashDevelop. You can also use F5 or F8. You can set up Flash to be the compiler, too. You can even run it in Parallels on OSX and have it use the OSX Flash IDE to compile.

FlashDevelop has TODO support. They appear in the Tasks panel. BUG shows up, too.

FlashDevelop has class lookup (F4) and you don’t have to highlight it, your caret just needs to be within the name of it.

FlashDevelop has syntax checking on save just like FlexBuilder.

FlashDevelop has customizable templates and snippets.

FlashDevelop has fantastic, customizable code generation.

FlashDevelop also doesn’t require you open a project to edit Actionscript files. You can open any AS file at any time in any way. Eclipse (therefore FDT and FB) require you to open a project first and then open at least ONE Actionscript file manually for you to be able to drag and drop an Actionscript file onto the application to open it.

FlashDevelop also doesn’t require that an Actionscript file you opened be part of the current project to get auto-completion, code-hints and syntax checking (for native Actionscript classes).

FlashDevelop is certainly well suited to Advanced AS3 Development. Give the money to the FlashDevelop guys. Their app is free, open-source and the best editor out there.

I don’t think FDT is worth the price tag. The lexical parsing is really nice, in fact, that is one feature that might make the lowest price version worthwhile, if only for finding bugs and other issues in your code the Flex compiler doesn’t.

I use FB3 for developing with Flash IDE, I used FlashDevelop prior and the only things I missed there were the ability to CMD+ENTER to compile and the //TODO List. Great thing about Eclipse is you can write in your won features or find people that have already done it for you. So I wrote the CMD+ENTER plug and downloaded a Task List Plug-in that works in FB.

Maybe I’ll give it another whirl because I’m interested to see what all of the hype is about and why it can command such a heavy tag. I wouldn’t recommend anybody installing it into Flex Builder however, so I’ll give it a whirl in Eclipse. Though I think it would have to make my coffee to drop that many nickels on it though.

What I’d like to see is a side-by-side comparison between FB3 and FTD …

even better – how even t save those 216 euros?? just download eclipse and the flex sdk for free, spending those hours understanding how to do it yourself won’t get to that price.

anyhow they are all thieves cause even flex and fdt is a custom build of eclipse – so it basically looks the same and behaves almost the same.

did you really bought it or got it for free so you would write this post (“..Thanks to Marcel from Slot3 and the guys from Powerflasher, since a couple of weeks I am equipped with a new, shiny FDT3 Enterprise license…”)??