Which PHP Editor do you use?

[The New Guy]

Now, before the advisors move this thread here me out. As I improve my PHP OO abilities I find myself wanting a much better editor or IDE. In general once you start put objects in other objects/arrays and so on I find myself really wanting an advanced auto complete much like the .NET and JAVA ide's.

For PHP Zend seems to be the best, yet it seems (at least to me) that many of you don't use it. Therefore, I am particularly interested in what some of SP's high profile and advanced php users use. Guys like Dr livingston, Ren, Lastcraft, dagfinn, kyberfabrikken etc.

Thanks.

[Ezku]

I'm using Eclipse IDE with PHPEclipse.

[sweatje]

TextPad or Vi

[JoL]

UEstudio (Ultra Edit Studio)

[The New Guy]

TextPad or Vi

May I ask why? From what I know they have only sytax highlighting rudamentory code templating. Do you just find that some of the features of high end IDE are just unnecessary?

[Ren]

Textpad, simple, its regexp relacements are nice, sometimes lacking in other editors, syntax highlighting is good enough to tell if i've typo'd, and never use code templating.

[rossriley]

Do you just find that some of the features of high end IDE are just unnecessary?

I certainly do. I use Textmate on osx. I do like having subversion built in, but if you build tests along with your OO code, you will find that most of the problems that advanced IDEs try to solve don't exist in the first place.

[Shrike]

May I ask why? From what I know they have only sytax highlighting rudamentory code templating. Do you just find that some of the features of high end IDE are just unnecessary?

Some people might say Vi is a high end editor

[DerelictMan]

...but if you build tests along with your OO code, you will find that most of the problems that advanced IDEs try to solve don't exist in the first place.

Most? I've seen the unit-testing-makes-debuggers-obselete argument, but that's generally as far as I've seen it taken. How does a testing suite make up for context assist, or object browsers when dealing with large object models (lots of objects, lots of methods, lots of relationships between them)? This isn't a challenge, I'm genuinely curious...

[dreamscape]

I use BBEdit mainly. I would have switched to TextMate, but I had to keep going back to BBEdit for some things that TextMate isn't powerful enough with, for example its search which isn't near powerful enough for me, so in the end I just stuck with BBEdit.

I briefly tried Zend Studio for OS X but really did not like it. It had a very clunky interface. It made me feel like I was on Windows (which is bad for an OS X program). It was not very intuitive. And the final strike was that it is Java, and personally I don't like Java applications on OS X. Unless there is a specific OS X version that has been written with OS X users in mind, usually Java apps on OS X, IMO, are very ugly and difficult to work with, and seemingly break almost every rule in the OS X Human Interface Guidelines.

[auricle]

jEdit on the Mac with various plugins for XMl and PHP: as a Java app on OSX it's not too bad.

KDevelop on Suse Linux. Hate it that opening a file from Konqueror or similar tool launches another instance of Kdevelop rather than opening the file int he currently running one. (Oddly enough, Kate doesn't do that.) Even Windows fixed this!

Speaking of Windows, I only ever have to use it at work (where I don't do any development).

[DerelictMan]

jEdit on the Mac with various plugins for XMl and PHP: as a Java app on OSX it's not too bad.

jEdit is also my editor when in PHP/Perl. What PHP-related jEdit plugins do you use? (curious)

[Jeff Lange]

Dreamweaver 8 for the win!

It's what I'm used to.

[sweatje]

May I ask why? From what I know they have only sytax highlighting rudamentory code templating. Do you just find that some of the features of high end IDE are just unnecessary?

I want an editor which supports syntax highlighting, regular expression search and replace, tab indentation and rectangular selection.

I like vi because it is pretty much ubiquitous in *nix environments.

[kyberfabrikken]

+1 for textpad.

Textpad, simple, its regexp relacements are nice, sometimes lacking in other editors, syntax highlighting is good enough to tell if i've typo'd, and never use code templating.

And you can search in files. With regex's.

I suspect that I mainly use it out of old habit though - there are probably lots of other fine editors around, but textpad always stayed faithful to me, so I wouldn't cheat on her.

[SirAdrian]

TruStudio (Eclipse) for projects, and PHP Designer 2005 for simple things.

[thr]

If I'm on windows it's Dreamweaver 8, yeah I know =P But most of my work is done in a linux env. and here Vim rules supreme . But tbh Dreamweaver 8 is realy realy realy nice for web development, in the standard appearance it kinda blows but I could post a prnt scrn on my setup later tho.

My dream editor would have DW8's Syntax Highlight, Vims keyboard commands, Code Completion/Autosensing of variable/field/method names a file-browse-list on the left/right and tabs that let you open multiple files at the same time. Yes there is such an editor but it's MacOSX only =/ *cry*

[auricle]

What PHP-related jEdit plugins do you use? (curious)

PHP Parser. It seems pretty good. It has some dependencies (other plugins), but I can't remember what they are.

[kyberfabrikken]

Just curious - Does anybody use Scite ?

[spinmaster]

I'm using NuSphere PHPEd... totally in love with it...

[G3D]

I'm using NuSphere PHPEd... totally in love with it...

Same here, I tried Zend but it was slow.

[Fjoggen]

I have become more and more found of KDE's KDevelop, but I only use it for projects. When I only need to write small scripts or similar i use Kate

[jayboots]

A long time ago I used TextPad, but I think that PSPad is its natural successor if you like that style of editor. It also works well under Wine -- though I still use vim quite a bit on both linux and windows.

PSPad implements all of sweatj's requirements and adds a code explorer, managers for code, project, ftp and snippets, integrated context sensitive help, keyboard macros and a slew of other features -- yet remains small and responsive.

[BerislavLopac]

I see nobody's mentioned ActiveState Komodo. It's absolutely the best.

[Findus]

vim without doubt.
It has every feature i could ever want and a million more. If something isnt in vim by default, i can either find it on the web or code it up myself.

At work we got our vim's configured to run tests for the class in question with a keystroke, to create the test class in its own file at the appropriate place in a keystroke (actually two keystrokes). It fills in starting comments based on fileending when i create a new file, i hit a f-key to insert a comment for a function.

It got no GUI = you develop your typing and becomes a _LOT_ quicker at programming.
No mouse support = you dont move your hands around = less of a health hazard.

Every *nix box (pretty much) has it installed.

Its quicker than any IDE you can find.

Widely used by people from all sorts of environments so support for every programming language shouldnt be a problem, and community around it for online help.

Its free.

I just need to type two characters to start it

I've tried my share of ide's etc but in the end i cant see me giving up vim untill i can code by thinking, without a keyboard.
The Pragmatic Programmer got an excellent section on editors and other tools in the "toolbox" chapter. I had used vim for 12 months when i read it, but it proved very well to myself that i had made a good choice.

THo i gotta say emacs isnt the worst choice either, tho i gotta hate it since i use vim