The coding blog of Alastair Smith, a software developer based in Cambridge, UK. Interested in DevOps, Azure, Kubernetes, .NET Core, and VueJS.
My new favourite resource for development-related questions, StackOverflow.com, already provides a number of answers to this. However, I’m interested to hear from you, my small community of readers, what IDE you use for PHP development, and why you like it. I’m looking for a good PHP IDE; I’ve tried Eclipse in the past, and whilst it goes like the clappers on my work machine, I’ve found it dog slow on my laptop. I also remember finding the PHP plug-in not being as good as the Java Development Tools in terms of re-factoring support. The syntax highlighting was top-notch, though :-p
I use Eclipse and Visual Studio at work for Java/J# and C# development, and they are both excellent for their languages. Visual Studio is a bit rubbish at Java/J#, but I’ve recently switched to Eclipse and I’m glad I did so. It’s the gold standard for IDEs when it’s in C# mode, particularly once you’ve got Resharper or similar installed, which adds some of the good stuff from Eclipse like quick and customisable code templates, file markers, more re-factorings, etc.
I’m looking for good Subversion support (but also the ability to move to Git/Mercurial relatively painlessly), syntax highlighting, and good re-factoring support. I’m not too keen to pay for the IDE; I’ve used Zend in the past and didn’t like it at all, and my PHP work these days is mostly tinkering so it’s not really worth the investment.
But most of all, I’d like to know what the professionals use in the field. I’d like to know what PHP’s gold standard IDE is.