For a long time I had always wanted to develop for the flash platform but the huge cost of the authouring suite always put me off. I tried a couple of open source ways to develop for the platform but none of them really worked well for me. Earlier this year during a random escapade on the Internet I came accross Flex.

I realized I had been left behind. I personally decided to get into this but I couldn’t really get a suitable editor. The Flex Builder is expensive and most of the options out there are targeted more to Windows than to Linux. So I had to make do with what I had and I stuck to one of my personal favorites GEdit. I like to use GEdit a lot because for some reason the Oblivion colour scheme seems to be very friendly to my eyes. Well this article is intend to help you configure GEdit so you could write codes for flex or ActionScript.

Asumptions

1. I am assuming that you have installed a copy of the Flex SDK and it is accessible through your PATH.
2. I am assuming that you have some basic understanding of bash sell scripting.

Configuring Gedit

In GEdit locate Tools >> External Tools. On the dialog that opens select New Tool. Give the tool a name and go ahead to give it a shortcut (Try to figure those out). In the commands section paste the following:

#!/bin/bash
if (/opt/flex-3.2/bin/mxmlc "$GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_PATH")
then
/opt/flex-3.2/bin/flashplayer "`echo $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_PATH | awk -F.mxml {'print $1'}`.swf"
fi


Be sure to replace /opt/flex-3.2 with the correct location of your flex SDK and you are good to go. Anytime you hit the shortcut for your external tool your flex compiler would be invoked.

For syntax hilighting you might want to use XML for the MXML files and JAVA for the ActionScript files.