Best development environment for PHP?

Question

What is the best development environment for PHP? I use Notepad++ with Vibrant Ink style and Windows Explorer for ftp.

very amateurish

Answer 1

"Best" is really subjective. You can check out Netbeans and Eclipse, but not sure what's wrong with Notepad++ :(

Edit: Oh, RapidPHP, friend of my swears by that.

Answer 2

Dupe of quite a few questions here. Take a look here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6166/any-good-php-ide-preferably-free-or-cheap

I use Netbeans by the way.

Answer 3

I use Ubuntu on my development desktop, running Apache with the same setup on the server on which the code is deployed. Not having to upload code to a remote server to run it is really convenient! It made my workflow a lot more graceful when I started doing this. Just save the file and hit f5, and your changes are there instantly.

Kate is my favorite editor for Linux. Notepadd++ and Kate are similar, but I consider Kate to be better organized. I don't think Kate is available for Windows, though.

Another editor I like is Komodo (that page is confusing, though - the editor is free, but they offer a commercial IDE as well). The handiest feature about Komodo, for me, is you can transparently edit remote files via ssh, so you don't need to worry about uploading or anything.

Does Windows Explorer support sftp? Using the plain FTP protocol isn't recommended, as it sends your authentication details (and all transfers) unencrypted. You may wish to get a program such as filezilla and start using sftp.

I wrote a small wrapper for scp so I can just upload files from the console, like ssend newfile.php. It's pretty convenient for when you're just editing a couple of files.