IDE stands for ‘Integrated Development Environment‘.

IDE is the place where you write your code.

For most of beginning AS developers this is Flash IDE (Flash MX, Flash 8 or Flash CS3). For basic code like gotoAndStop and gotoAndPlay standard code editor is just nothing more needed.

However, when you grow up as a programmer and step deeper into ActionScript classes and language paradigms you will feel that Flash IDE is not what developers might dream about. There is a number of editors which support ActionScript language, however I would recommend the one I use myself.

Please welcome – FlashDevelop.

That’s the best IDE I could find for AS2 and AS3 development.

The best thing it is FREE.

Here is a the info taken from the official community website:

Summary

FlashDevelop is a popular open source ActionScript 2/3 and web development environment.
FlashDevelop seemlessly integrates with Adobe Flash IDE, Adobe Flex SDK, Mtasc, Haxe and Swfmill.

Main Features

* AS3 Project management with seamless and optimized Adobe Flex SDK integration
* AS2 Project management with seamless Swfmill and Mtasc integration (using a portable standalone command line tool)
* Advanced ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3 completion & code exploration with automatic classpath detection (even without project)
* Smart contextual Actionscript code generators
* SWF and SWC classes and symbols exploration
* Test movie in Adobe Flash IDE and with clickable error results (Flash CS3)
* MTASC compilation/code checking with clickable error results

I personally like the autofill feature, which is only partially implemented in standard IDE.

Useful shortcut is Ctrl+D, which duplicates the current line and doesn’t affect the clipboard.

Also, Firefox-like search panel to look for needed code is very comfortable.

There are many of other features you may discover 😉

So, give FlashDevelop a try and I’m sure you will hardly write anything longer than two lines of code in standard Flash IDE!