JCS Development

After reading Dan Pearce’s harrowing account of his Bigfoot sighting I was alsook page”>Dan Pearce’s harrowing account of his Bigfoot sighting I was reinvigorated to try and seek out the best PHP IDE for me.

I tried updated versions of Aptana, NuSphere’s PHPED, and the brand new WeBuilder 2014 (greatly improved I must add).

Then some developers who shall remain nameless (basically because I can’t remember their names) turned me on to JetBrains PHPStorm. Needless to say I was skeptical, especially because it was written in Java (not the biggest fan). It took some getting used to, a.k.a a learning curve. Not everything, especially the key commands, worked as I expected it to. However, after a few weeks of forcing myself to use it I got more excited about it.

In keeping with my previous post on why I was looking here’s the criteria it met, and some great new things:

1. Syntax Coloring – It comes with a ton of themes out of the box (or off the net).  It allows you to customize them and save them with a different name to make your own.  Also, there’s a great community and people have created a number of themes.
2. Code Completion  (a.k.a Intellisense) – this is the best I’ve found.  Not only does it do PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS but you can add external libraries that you use to it.  For me that means downloading the development version of jQuery and putting it in the external libs in my project, and getting full intellisense support.  Works for lots of other plug-in type things.
3. HTML/CSS Code completion – perfect on everything I’ve thrown at it.
4. Code Folding – This is great, and even has keyboard shortcuts for various things (like fold all).
5. Integrated FTP sync. – This is called “deployment” in the editor and can be set up a number of ways, although I haven’t quite figured them out.  I’ve got it working for a Sync all, up/down and compare files.  Does pretty good.
6. Code Snippets Library – I find I need this less and less so I’m removing it.  Although it does have it.

New Stuff:

1. Code Explorer – I’ve see this in a few other editors but didn’t figure it out until this one.  Works great, takes me to any function I’m using, even when I’m looking “in files”.
2. Path in tabs –   When you open a file you can trace it back via a little bar above the tabs for the file.  Helpful as it always has the root directory so you can make sure you know where you’re using the relative path’s correctly.
3. Move lines up and down – Ctrl-Shift-<up arrow>
4. Last edit location - Ctrl-Shift-<backspace> takes you the last “area” of coding you were in.  So helpful.
5. SCM Integration – They got the usual’s SVN, CVS, Git.  But they also have to my shock a plugin that gives you Microsoft Team Foundation Server capabilities.  May not be important to everybody but I do a lot of work in Microsoft Shops and it’s standard there.

I’d ramble on and on but likely I’ve found my editor.  A personal license is $99 USD not too steep but not the cheapest either.  Worth it to me.

P.S.  I’m forcing myself to learn the  new kid on the block Sublime Text simply to see if it’s got the same things I need.  It’s very popular so that makes me want to try it out.  Pretty good so far but the FTP thing is really awkward.  The code snippets things is really cool though.

Well now that we know there IS a Bigfoot, I can’t wait to hang out with him… looks like he lives in some pretty country.