I use notepad for editing PHP, What am I missing?

**Archbob** · May 12, 2005, 18:30

Originally Posted by ruben

Coding in Notepad is like playing football with a pig bladder.

I pwn in football with pig bladders!

**TheOriginalH** · May 12, 2005, 21:12

The support for MX (and I have been a supporter myself) makes me chuckle.

A MM spokesman at a conference pre-DW4 (well, MM4) told me, in front of a busy audience that they had no plans to support php as it was not a "serious" web language.....this while showing how good ColdFusion integration was going to be (Allaire recently acquired)!

The simple answer to the first question "What am I missing" is:

Colour coding
Decent colour coding (and most of the editors mentioned so far have it to some degree) can REALLY help when looking over your code. As an example, if you know that a certain section should be the colour that echoed or printed text is, and it isn't, you can be fairly certain of a syntax error somewhere before that point.

Line numbering
Advantages go without saying, n'est pas?

Code completion
This can seem clunky and annoying to some at first, but when you are the master of it (rather than the other way around), it is incredibly useful for speedy coding.

Code snippets/repositories
Crazy to try and work without 'em imho.

There are just a few things you're "missing".

**trhynard** · May 12, 2005, 22:39

I use EditPlus 2 and it does everything I need it to...

**momos** · May 13, 2005, 00:31

BBEdit all the way. I used to use Textpad on windows, which was not bad...

**G3D** · May 13, 2005, 01:39

PhpEd supporter here. Some people consider it quite expensive at $300, if you don't make money coding I can see how this would be the case. If you code professionally though thats a drop in the ocean.

Quick feature list.

Enhanced integration. Integrate PhpED IDE with 3rd party tools like PHP encoders, formatters or HTML validators.
New embedded tools for more effective coding, editing and code management. PhpED IDE includes a number of pre-configured tools like PHP documentor, HTML Tidy and CVS client.
Advanced code-completion. Now PhpED supports object-oriented coding for PHP, as well as HTML or CSS code.
Unmatched customization. Enrich the IDE with new commands and correct the predefined ones.
Project-wide code analyzer in PhpED IDE shows all php classes, methods, properties, functions and variables in every detail detail and facilitates object-oriented programming.
Advanced PHP profiler. PhpED profiler shows executing time for each line, function or module of the code with tenth millisecond's precision. You can locate all the bottlenecks quickly and efficiently. Profiler saves all the timings among multiple sessions so your can compare them and evaluate your improvements.
Support for international character sets, including UTF-8. PhpED IDE can be used to create web sites in different encodings.
Secure deployment. Support for FTPS (TLS/SSL) and WebDAV/HTTPS (SSL) protocols make deployment and data transfer secure now
New code highlighting features greatly facilitate your working with PHP, XML, XHTML, HTML, CSS and JavaScript code.
Code templates allow you to type whole code fragments at once by a single key press. You can add new templates and change existing ones.
Fully customizable shortcuts, advanced editor features such as brace matching, context-sensitive auto-indent and smart-home speed up your work significantly.
New search and replace scope. Now find and replace works in multiple files and directories as well as in all opened files! Regular expressions allow you to find text using complex conditions.
Improved support for drag-n-drop operations. Try to drag an image from the file browser or project manager in to your HTML page directly. Database explorer supports drag operations too.
Handy NuSOAP classes can be dragged directly to your code just like the code templates.
Hints show you arguments and returning value for a just typed function, as well as a short description for them.
Fast functions reference shows you all the PHP functions as they are available from PHP extensions.
Enhanced project deployment. Once publishing is set up according to your needs, you can upload your PHP projects with a single click!
Using integrated MySQL and UltraSQL/PostgreSQL clients, you can work with your databases from one IDE.
NuSOAP compatibility. With supplied NuSOAP library, you can build a Web Service in less than few minutes. Your existing php functions can work as Web Services with a very tiny wrapper provided by NuSOAP. No WSDL creation required, everything is done on the fly.
Seamlessly integrated CVS client enables you to easily review changes in old versions of a source files to track bugs while working on the same project in a team of developers.
New extensible help subsystem supports CHM tutorials and allows you get the right reference at the right moment. Well designed PHP, HTML, MySQL, PostgreSQL and CSS manuals are included.

**chakotha** · May 13, 2005, 05:09

I also have to vote for EditPad Lite.

I have tried jEdit and Crimson Editor and PHP Designer (v. impressive) but I always find myself back using EditPad Lite.

My fave feature is that you can Find and Replace across all open files. I don't bother with the syntax highlighting.

What really does it for me is that it loads in a second.

http://www.editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html

**m0n5t3r** · May 13, 2005, 05:14

When I was using windows, I used to like EditPlus a lot. After I switched to a better OS, I've been using Quanta+ and Jedit (my current editor of choice).

**Ealameda** · May 13, 2005, 12:11

I used to use a combination of Dreamweaver for extended coding 'bouts and notepad when i just needed to do something quick - but my new job had me switch to using Kwrite (running on Linux of course) and I must say - I've grown to really love using it as my code editor.

fast, clean, sytanx highlighting, color coding (even recognizes and color-codes variables that are called within strings, brace balancing, etc, etc -- plus it has a bunch of features I never thought of using before such as marking code blocks to make them easy to find again later, and making all braces collapsible (so i hide from view blocks of code that aren't relevant to what I'm working on)

highly recommend it if you've got a linux box you can work from.

**dmsuperman** · May 13, 2005, 12:35

There really is no reason to use anything more than notepad2 or metapad, whichever. If you cannot code some of the simple stuff that is the biggest part of the other ones, you really don't deserver to be coding at all yet. You need to be coding everything from scratch, until you start to get a lot better, in which case you still don't need the others, you use your own libraries and classes.

**medicjoe95** · May 13, 2005, 12:42

Originally Posted by Mike

I use TextPad. I dont like editors wih 10 bloody panes with code libraries and bookmarks and whatnot. All I need is a blank screen to type in. And tabbed windows is sweet.

I'm downloading NP to check out, heredoc support sounds bloody awesome!

Exit them out =/

**J Henry Waugh** · May 13, 2005, 14:14

In vi, in your ~/.vimrc file, add this line:

Code:

set nobackup

I use VI primarily, what you're missing by using NotePad is the following:

* Color syntax coding, not everyone appreciates this, but I find it nice for the simple fact that langauge keywords are colored differently saving me time from looking up if I spelled a particular function name properly.

* Line numbers, so when you're eliminating script errors, you can see where error is (or just type vi +33 somefile.php to instantly pop into that number).

* Matching up braces and parenthesis (love that '%' key, shows you matching brace or it can do it as you type though I keep that feature off).

* Regular expression search power

* Macro ability to assign keys to perform tasks, for instance, I have F3 and F4 defined to ssh/scp a copy of the file being edited to remote server from local server and place on correct node of filesystem (uses simple little bash script). You can set edit/command keys to perform various tasks, depending on need.

**Dylan B** · May 13, 2005, 18:43

gVim is really good.

**Mike** · May 13, 2005, 18:45

Originally Posted by medicjoe95

Exit them out =/

That would competely defeat the purpose of having an editor that supports them, then.

I'm more than happy with TextPad.

**evilive98** · May 13, 2005, 22:51

i use PHP Expert Editor i find it to be everything i need

**macgruder** · May 14, 2005, 01:19

Couldn't live without BBEdit. It does not suck.

**Viflux** · May 14, 2005, 04:38

Originally Posted by J Henry Waugh

* Line numbers, so when you're eliminating script errors, you can see where error is (or just type vi +33 somefile.php to instantly pop into that number).

CTRL + G in Notepad

**mark_W** · May 14, 2005, 04:41

Originally Posted by Viflux

CTRL + G in Notepad

hehe, thats pretty handy!

**seanf** · May 14, 2005, 04:41

It doesn't get much better than Komodo for me

Sean

**rgremill** · May 14, 2005, 06:17

On a few of my sites I actually did all of the coding inside of an HTML TEXTAREA field. That has got to be worse than notepad (or even wordpad). If an error happened on a specific line number I would copy everything into winVi to find out where it was breaking.

I've used vi a long time, but know a true IDE would work great for PHP.

**Mandibal** · May 14, 2005, 07:19

Jedit is a very nice editor. I use Zend but it's slowness is annoying, particularly when a quote is opened. (at least on OS X). And for linux I prefer emacs over vi.

**PlayOn** · May 14, 2005, 15:26

Notepad has always worked out very well for me.

**Luke Redpath** · May 14, 2005, 20:57

Quite surprised nobody has mentioned Eclipse yet. Its probably the most adaptable, extensible IDE out there. I use it with the Xored Trustudio plugin, as well as Subclipse for source control. There are loads of plugins out there for things such as database design and UML editing too. For a Java app its qutie responsive and doesn't have too many UI quirks (though the lack of shift+tab through the tabs is annoying).

I've tried PHP Designer and I don't see what the fuss is about - it seemed very buggy to me. Same goes for Zend Studio.

As far as simple text-editors go, I've yet to find any better than Notepad++. And I use Topstyle for html/css (something which Eclipse lacks in somewhat).

Finally, I couldn't take anybody who genuinely believes working all day in Notepad is a good thing seriously.

**Czaries** · May 15, 2005, 00:40

I use Macromedia Dreamweaver MX all the time now and there is no looking back. The only thing I do not like about it is the very large resources consumed by the program for just simple text editing. The startup process takes a bit too long as well.

My second alternative text-editor (for my slower machines) is HTML-Kit ( http://www.chami.com/html-kit/ - it is FREE), which does far more than just HTML. It loads faster, and consumes surprisingly few resources for all that it does. Tabbed browsing, syntax highlighting for all major coding languages, etc. It also has a very large community that supports it so there are hundreds of plugins you can download if you feel it lacking (which I doubt you will)