What IDE do you use to develop PHP? Sorta sick of Zend.

Question

It's hard to express how much grief and ire Zend has caused me already.
The sheer amount of bugs is overwhelming.

Maybe I'm just technically-impaired with everything Zendy, but I find it practically impossible to work on a remote server.
What with the sudden hangs, the pop-up errors that seem to have nothing to do with what you're working on, and my personal favorite - files beings saved on the local workspace, but not on the remote server,
leaving me clueless as to why the hell won't the page I'm working on won't update even though I've (seemingly) saved it already...

I've tried working with phpDesigner in the past, found it a little uncomfortable.
Also, I've heard about the Visual Studio PHP extension, but I've been told that its terrible.
Yet, Visual Studio is right in my comfort-zone when it comes to programming, should I give it a shot anyway? And are there any other worthy IDE's for Windows?

Answer 1

I don't use a full-blown IDE, but I have used Komodo Edit in the past, and it's not a bad editor.

Answer 2

Eclipse PDT works great, allows for debugging (with XDebug or Xend), and has plenty of extensions for source control etc. It can also be tailored to look a lot like Visual Studio, should you like. Highly recommended.

Answer 3

Although known for its support for Java development, Netbeans is another IDE which provides a package with support for PHP.

Here's a few related questions that might be of interest:

• What program do you use to edit php remotely and then upload to your server?
• best IDE / Editor for PHP
• What are some pros and cons of the various PHP IDEs?

You may also want to do a search for "php" and "ide" for more on this topic.

(Disclaimer: I don't personally use Netbeans for PHP development.)

Answer 4

Not a full blown IDE, but a mixture of vim with bash scripts is very effective.

You can have autocompletion, syntax highlighting, etc, but one of the main advantages is the fact that the environment is available on most servers so you can use the same tools for remote development.

Some reading:

Vim for PHP programmers

Vim as a PHP IDE

Vim Productivity Tips for PHP Developers

Answer 5

You should try Delphi for PHP for native PHP. But my choice is Phalanger - Phalanger on Codeplex (Phalanger Home Page). It is a open source .Net PHP implementation (and Visual Studio add-in), more fast then original PHP (twice at least), with benefit of using any PHP or CLR-based library.