In the last survey on the best PHP IDE for 2014, my longtime favorite PhpED was missing. I didn’t act on it then, but what better way to spread the love than to devote an article to it.
I’ve spent the first part of my programming career without a real IDE. UltraEdit was meeting most of my needs. At a certain point you start to realize you’re missing out on something and the quest for a real IDE begins.
For quite some time I was relatively happy with NetBeans; after some time though, I did find myself fighting it on too many occasions. I again concluded that it was time to move on. Having a historical hate for Eclipse (we had a serious misunderstanding back at version 3 dot something from which I still haven’t recovered) meant I had to test the commercial IDEs.
Why I chose PhpED
Speed, overview and simplicity. That sums it up, really. There are a few things that mattered for me, speed-wise; switching projects, getting code suggestions and fast debugging. Overview is something that I want because my projects get quite complex at times. An IDE like Eclipse overwhelms me with way too many options and buttons which I hardly ever use, keep it simple please. I believe I found my requirements and more in PhpED…
Project wizard
The project wizard will help you set up your project like you want it; simple local project, local server or remote server. Run on web server and/or CLI. Set up the directories, code page, PHP/html/CSS versions and finally checking to see if the debugger is working. It’ll be quite specific on how to fix issues or offer to fix them should there be any.
Coding
All the normal things are present when it comes to editing code: dynamic syntax highlighting for multiple languages, variable highlighting, fast searching and more. The code suggestion is instant; the IDE presents the possibilities that match the start that you typed. When you find what you wanted and your code is documented using PHPDoc, then it’ll show that while you’re entering your variables.
In the example above, you can perhaps spot something that can be improved; it fails to show multiline comments of the documentation. This is good to get a simple overview of the function call, but quite often you document something for a reason and you want to see it all.
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