Scalable PHP editor

Question

I work in a very large PHP codebase from a Windows box, and I'm looking for an editor with good code browsing capabilities, and one which will scale to a large codebase.

I've started using Eclipse PDT for a couple days, and while I like the feature set for the most part, I've found it to be unreliable. It randomly hangs for long periods of time, takes forever to index, runs out of memory or randomly sends error messages very often, and has some annoying behavior as files in the project change.

I welcome two types of answers
1) What is a good scalable PHP IDE? Bonus points if it's a VS plugin, but I'm willing to learn anything. More Bonus points if it has JavaScript support. Non-free is okay.
2) If anyone else has gone through growing pains with Eclipse, what advice can you give, or what settings can be tweaked to make it more reliable?

Update I determined the source of the Eclipse hangs was an issue at the networking level, which I've fixed. So I'm going to take another crack at this. Thanks for all the advice, I'm sure it will come in handy.

Answer 1

I would recommend you Aptana! It's free, supports JS and is also cross platform.

Answer 2

Stackoverflow Archive:

• Which IDE (Editor) is for me?
• What is the Best IDE for PHP?
• Online PHP IDE?
• Lightweight auto-completing PHP editor?
• The Best PHP Editor for Vista
• Best IDE / Editor for PHP
• What is the Best Opensource PHP IDE out there?
• Fast Windows PHP editor with SVN and FTP support?

External Resources:

• Wikipedia: List of PHP Editors
• Seven Great PHP IDEs Compared
• Online Reviews of PHP Editors (Select platform / license to view)

Answer 3

NetBeans is all I use. Switched from Eclipse for similar reasons. Free. JS support (inc. jQuery and client-side debugging).

Non free: Zend studio based on Eclipse.

Answer 4

I've been using Eclipse for a couple of version now. I have found that I prefer to download the main project, and then add modules I want instead of the pre-packaged setups. I've generally found this to be a more stable configuration than to grab pre-packaged installs.

Answer 5

Aptana is based upon eclipse. I like aptana but if you did not like eclipse then I think you could try netbeans php ide

Answer 6

I switched from Zend Studio 6 (buggy as hell) to PHPDesigner and it' is pretty great, although there is no code folding, which annoys me sometimes, but overall it's awesome. It offers debugging, built-in svn using Tortoise and Projects (including 3rd party libs).

Answer 7

Hi, Komodo IDE has:

• PHP and Javascript debugger - which can be used with Vim BTW.
• VCS integration (not only svn),
• not in Java: scales better for large codebases on modest hardware,
• many, many more convenient features...

Answer 8

I work in a very large PHP codebase from a Windows box, and I'm looking for an editor with good code browsing capabilities, and one which will scale to a large codebase*

The Zeus IDE has a code navigation browser powered by the information produced by ctags and I am pretty sure ctags has support for PHP.

The tags information produced is maintained by the IDE and held in a sqlite database file and this inforamtion is fully browsable and searchable.

Now I am not sure how big your very large codebase is but Zeus might/might not be able to handle it.

With a very large codebase the tags database might take a several minutes to build to and maybe more than a few seconds each time the database needs to be update.

Answer 9

I would personally recommend NetBeans, which seems to perform better than the Eclipse-based alternatives. NetBeans also has superb PHP support, quite on-par with the commercial Zend Studio.

However, if you otherwise like Eclipse, I would suggest tweaking the .ini files. One of them contains how much memory it'll use, you could increase that, for example up to 2 GBs if you have enough RAM, which will make it perform better.

Komodo IDE is a feasible alternative if you have a lower spec PC. As it doesn't use Java like jpic said, it'll perform better. However, it does not have nearly as good coding help features as NetBeans or Zend Studio.