“Workbench's tie-in to the Repository is very helpful. When editing text, you can see all of the tags without having to look them up. We really like Workbench—and we have only scratched the surface of its capabilities.”

Gary Surma
Monette Information Systems

“We really like the color configurations in Professional Series Workbench. You can customize the colors of your files. We assign different colors to different function types, which makes it a lot easier to get around the program and to find things.”

Richard Barndt
Computers Unlimited

“Tagging is by far the most useful feature in my opinion. I use it to help me remember arguments for Toolkit routines that I wrote, as well as utility routines I've written for other customers. When used with the Repository, it sure does make it easy to select member fields in a structure, rather than having to remember their names or refer back to the Repository. There are many features of Visual SlickEdit…that I find useful: regular expressions, especially in the Replace function, for instance. I have often used this feature to convert a C header file to a Synergy include file with one command. Not only that, but the Replace function also lets you span files in a project, so you can do mass replacements much easier than even with powerful editors like vi and ed. Lately I've been using the "Restrict to selection" checkbox in the Replace dialog—that's really handy to limit your replacements to an area of the file.

Color coding is very useful to me—often giving me a visual cue that I've keyed something wrong—like when I accidentally use the C++ '//' to precede a comment. When it doesn't turn green (the color for comments) I know I've made a mistake. Same for matching quotation marks and the color for literals. Likewise, the visual cue on matching parentheses (momentary highlight to the matching one) I find very difficult to do without when I have to use more primitive editors like Microsoft Visual Studio or vi. Auto indent when pasting code inside a begin-end block is a big time saver. The context-sensitive auto indentation saves keystrokes in general. MS Visual Studio and vi have limited auto-indent features, and neither will auto-indent pasted code. I now use "View/Hex" in preference to the "od" (octal dump) utility for viewing what characters really are in a file. I like the fact that if you highlight the characters in normal view, they remain highlighted when you switch to hex view. It's easy to find routines with the "Procs" tab in the left-hand pane. It's really nice to always have the ASCII Table available (Tools/Ascii Table) in decimal, hex, and character columns.”

Sterling W. (Chip) Camden
Camden Software Consulting

“I love the integration to Compiler. I love being able to jump around, and the pop-ups for routines.”

Bob Woodrow
CareCentric