Smallest IDE for PHP with code-completion?

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396

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+7 Q:

Smallest IDE for PHP with code-completion?

There are plenty of small editors like Notepad++, vim, & SciTE - but they only work on one file at a time. In other words, they aren't aware of the whole scope of the codebase.

On the other hand, all the full IDE's I have seen which offer code-completion (over all files in a project) take a good amount of memory to run. Eclipse PDT, PHPStorm, etc..

I'm looking for a tiny IDE with nothing more than code completion and syntax coloring to move around some very limit dev systems running PHP. Is there anything like this?

Windows or Linux

Update

To clarify, if the app can't do multi-file code completion (complete code in one file, based on classes in other files) then it doesn't fit my requirements.

+8 A:

Try Komodo Edit or Komodo IDE. It has all PHP assistance features included and even debugging (in IDE).

http://www.activestate.com/komodo-ide

It has some bugs like PHP variables showing up in JavaScript autocomplete.

Try the v6 beta: http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit/downloads

SHiNKiROU 2010-08-30 22:11:17

Thanks, but I'm not looking for just another IDE. I'm looking for a small, basic, light-weight IDE. However, I'm sure people using normal IDE's will like this.

Xeoncross 2010-08-31 01:17:55

@Xeoncross: "I don't want to use a normal IDE. I want to use an editor with all the features of an IDE, but I want to be less resource intensive than an IDE". .... you cannot have it both ways. Pick one.

Billy ONeal 2010-08-31 02:32:04

Komodo is not a language-specific IDE, so you are looking for a PHP-only IDE?

SHiNKiROU 2010-08-31 03:07:45

@Billy where are you getting your wild quotes? My question is very simple - *What is the smallest IDE with code completion?*

Xeoncross 2010-08-31 16:49:20

Komodo Edit is definitely lighter than an IDE: http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit/compare-with-komodo-ide

dlamblin 2010-09-07 21:56:57

+7 A:

I use MacVim and I often have multiple files open in separate tabs.

Vim supports syntax highlighting out of the box and code completion if you use ctags plugins.

See also:

Bill Karwin 2010-08-30 22:16:31

Does exuberant ctags support php?

dlamblin 2010-09-07 21:52:56

@dlamblin: The second link I give above is about using exuberant ctags with vim.

Bill Karwin 2010-09-07 22:12:33

+14 A:

Netbeans is the best performing PHP editor with code completion that I have used; that said, it's by no means a lightweight editor. But I don't think any kind of editor with code completion is going to be truly lightweight.

Billy ONeal 2010-08-30 22:20:01

+1 for mentioning Netbeans. Netbeans is the tool of choice for me when programming (has excelllent support for C, python, Php and Java of course)

Andrei Ciobanu 2010-08-30 23:01:11

I'm trying netbeans and it does seem to be smaller than the others. The download is only 31MB and installed it's only +120MB. The RAM usage also seems to be lower. However, it's still rather large.

Xeoncross 2010-08-31 01:19:04

@Xeoncross: In order to support code completion, the editor needs to have most (if not all) of your code in memory, and it needs to have it in such a form so that it can operate on it efficiently enough to give you useful results. That's never going to be cheap in terms of memory. You simply are not going to get code completion features cheaply in terms of computational resources. Code completion is not a small add on feature to an IDE; it is often the most complex and resource intensive part of the IDE. You're either going to have to pay for that, or you're not going to have code completion.

Billy ONeal 2010-08-31 02:15:22

@Billy Fully understood. However, the question of finding the smallest option still remains. In the end, only one program uses the least amount of memory - and that just might be netbeans.

Xeoncross 2010-08-31 16:46:54

+1 for NetBeans for PHP. Nowhere near lightweight though :P

ign 2010-09-09 13:05:13

-1. It has much poorer support for PHP than Eclipse PDT and the discontinued Aptana Studio for PHP. At least last time I checked (not very long ago), you couldn't 'jump to definition' of functions or variables. And it needs installation, as opposed to Eclipse.

Alexander 2010-09-09 13:22:03

@Alexander: He didn't ask for which editor had the best PHP support, he asked which was the best performing. Even fans of Eclipse aren't going to say it's well performing editor. More to the point, **the OP explicitly asked to avoid PDT in his question**! (Personally I think Eclipse is the worst editor I have ever used, but that's not really relevant to the question).

Billy ONeal 2010-09-09 13:25:50

@Billy ONeal, NetBeans isn't lighter than Eclipse, and it performs slower when editing CSS. I now have a Eclipse based IDE (Aptana) opened, with 3 open projects, and it takes up 90Mb of RAM, while NetBeans, just launched, no projects opened, takes up 160Mb. Great performance and functionality compared to NetBeans.

Alexander 2010-09-09 13:32:31

@Alexander: I didn't base my performance tests on how much RAM the system used, I Based it on how much UI lag there was with a large project open. Netbeans doesn't cause my system to hang, Eclipse does. But even if that wasn't the case, **the OP explicitly asked to avoid PDT in his question**. So even if Eclipse had been the best answer, it would not be a good answer here.

Billy ONeal 2010-09-09 13:37:04

@Billy ONeal, I base my performance tests on both RAM and UI lags (only UI lags I saw were on gnome DE). Aptana manages to work extremely well simultaneously with a lot of open projects, like a wordpress distribution with over 200 themes and a lot of plugins, a Joomla distribution with over 50 themes, while having opened over 20 files. Great code completion, a bit buggy in coloring when it encounters spaghetti code, but in the rest, I frankly don't know what you are talking about when referring to poor performance. If Aptana is considered slow, how can NetBeans be mentioned?

Alexander 2010-09-09 13:45:12

@Alexander: Go troll somewhere else. I'm done.

Billy ONeal 2010-09-09 14:08:42

One thing I never understood is why so many of these great IDEs are built with Java. That alone is a performance problem :P

Franz 2010-09-09 16:32:29

@Billy ONeal, Do you need a screencast or something? Control your emotions. @Franz, it's because these IDEs were made for Java, on Java in the first place, then there were plugins. I know another great IDE for PHP, non-Java, but it's commercial. It's called VS.PHP, it's a plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio. It's simply great, but compared to Aptana it's not that much greater to spend so much money, IMO. Anyway, those are fully-featured IDEs, which trade speed to functionality, which isn't quite what the author was looking for. Better try that Geany :)

Alexander 2010-09-09 21:18:45

+2 A:

PHP Expert Editor is a fairly small app that allows editing of multiple files, has syntax highlighting and integrates with PHP to do syntax checking. I've been using it for years.

tcrosley 2010-08-30 22:34:24

+1 A:

I use notepad++ most of the time. But you could try out this free IDE which I think fits your bill Codelobster It's around 13mb

resting 2010-09-06 20:36:20

+1 A:

I quite like PHPEdit, although it still has bloat (I still use VIM for plenty of my PHP work). It has projects (allowing management of multiple files) PHP native and user-defined code-completition and syntax highlighting. Real-time debugging too (although we're creeping into bloat territory here - this is an expensive task to be running). Can't say if it'd be the smallest, I certainly find it snappier than Eclipse, but I doubt that's saying much... someone's going to install and test all these options to see.

Rudu 2010-09-07 21:49:21

+2 A:

Nusphere PHPEd. That's the one I use after horrible Java based alternatives and Zend Studio to name the waterheaded ones :P. It's blazing fast, has built in code completion library, fully customizable syntax highlighting for PHP 4.x, PHP 5.x, PHP 5.3, html, css, smarty, perl, sql, xml, c/c++, python, asp, js and who knows what else.

Highlights:

Über fast development environment.
Awesome file manager options (SFTP, SSH, etc.)
Fully customizable syntax highlighting (light/dark profiles)
Built in debugger
Fully customizable editor options (brackets, completion, whatever...)

Jauzsika 2010-09-08 18:29:47

I'm considering switching to this IDE, it's a shame that Zend had discontinued the Studio 5.5, the newer version has all the crap of Eclipse and 5.5 only runs on XP.

Alix Axel 2010-09-09 19:22:05

Yeah, I used Zend Studio 5.5 too and when they changed to eclipse, the whole became a bloated nightmare. PHPEd Roxx.

Jauzsika 2010-09-09 20:33:44

+1 A:

The best PHP IDE now in production would be Zend Studio, but it's not free. So the closest would be Eclipse PDT, but you don't like it.

Aptana Studio for PHP was a lot better, but was discontinued, and Aptana became an IDE for JS and Ruby now, but I tried to save what's left of it, so it's still available.

So far I didn't find anything better than Aptana Studio for PHP.

Big throwback though - it only supports syntax of PHP 5.2.

Aptana is also one of the greatest IDE for Javascript, and HTML+CSS editing is also a step further than in NetBeans (code completion for CSS selectors, based on HTML).

Aptana also has support for Smarty template engine, which is great for me.

Best part - no installation required. Just unzip and run. It only requires JRE to be installed, and most of us do have it installed. And, it may create conflicts with Eclipse projects, so for a clean experiment, open a project that contains no Eclipse service files.

Alexander 2010-09-09 13:27:36

+4 A:

Geany is my editor of choice. It's small, cross-platform, (GTK) and supports literally dozens of languages. (including PHP) It has syntax highlighting, code-completion and even custom "build" commands. (such as php -l for sanity checks)

Dominic Barnes 2010-09-09 13:51:24

I'd like to add that it's very lightweight compared to other IDEs (which is what the asker is asking for); It starts up in about 5 seconds, while NetBeans takes a whole minute.

imgx64 2010-09-09 13:56:58

Wow, Geany is amazing! It takes only 9MB to run and starts as fast as you can click a file! Built in terminal, info status bar, supports most languages out of the box, file browser, you don't have to create a new project - just open a folder, shows all variables used (click to goto), defaults to tabs+UTF-8, and the list goes on-and-on! Perfect answer to light-weight IDE! **AUTO-COMPLETES CLASS NAMES BASED OFF CLASSES YOU WRITE!**

Xeoncross 2010-09-09 19:06:53

Score! Another convert :)

Dominic Barnes 2010-09-09 20:32:50

ansaurus

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Smallest IDE for PHP with code-completion?

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