Can BC3 be used as an IDE to programming languages?

[DorothyFan1]

I'm upgrading my license to get the "Professional" version of BC3...but I'm wondering if there's any option to allowing BC3 to act as a supplementary coding environment much like VIM, TextPad, EditPlus, Zeus, EditPad Pro or even UltraEdit.

It would be great to have this ability to just open files for synch jobs and then open files individually for syntax color based coding work. This would be killing two birds with one stone. Has anybody else wondered whether BC3 should get this capability?

[Michael Bulgrien]

Beyond Compare does not currently support stand-alone edit sessions (where there is only one pane instead of two sides of a compare). While it is possible to open source code on one side of a text compare and leave the other side blank, I wouldn't call that a "supplementary coding environment" as described in your post.

The topic has come up before, however. Supporting a stand-alone edit session may be on the wish list, but I suspect it is fairly far down on the list...

[gstrader]

I concur

I am already using BC3 for this purpose. I open a session with the same folder on both sides. When I click on a file, it opens the same file in split screen compare mode. I drag the middle bar all the way over to the right, then start editing the left side. If it's not checked out from TFS, BC prompts me to check it out. When I'm doing making changes, I drag the bar to the middle again and double check the changes I've made. The right side shows the original version, until you save. Then I use BC to check the file back in.

The BC3 features that prompted me to switch to this technique:
1) Full text edit mode (I love it)
2) Integration with TFS
3) Syntax highlighting

A simple useful enhancement for me would be to move the middle bar all the way to the right side when you double click it, like some other applications do.