Preferred PHP Editor?
 

I'm looking for some suggestions on PHP editors to use. I've been using PHP Designer 2005 the last while and it was great (for vBulletin stuff / small projects). I've been getting more into IDEs now and I tried Zend Studio and man, I can't believe how slow everything is. Editing a 5200 line file was, well, less than acceptable; my computer isn't bad, I have a 1.2GHz processor and 768MB of ram (which should IMO be good enough for editing text files).

2 features I would really like are code folding + auto completion for functions.

Any suggestions?

I use Notepad ++

now, jsut becasue it has the letters n-o-t-e-p-a-d in it, dosent mea it sucks, its actchually quite a good program, it has lots of neat features, worth looking into!

Edit plus for every thing ;)

Thanks,
Mat

Wordpad or Notepad - I am unaware of any auto-completing products for use with PHP functions :)

Chris

I'm looking for an IDE to be more specific... I am downloading TruStudio right now, so I'll see how that goes.

I really like Zend Studio, I think I would buy it if it wasn't so slow on my PC.

on Mac, we mostly use BBEdit, but is not free, so most freelancers are not interested to pay for it... (ok, i may be a rich coder to buy this 200$ tool!)

Why would you use anything else. EDIT PLUS IS THE WAY TO GO!!!

Zend Studio, but I determined it's garbage after playing with Eclipse some more. I have yet to find a PHP IDE editor that isn't crap compared to editors available for Java like Eclipse. I'm using Dreamweaver 8 right now, mainly because (1) I'm too traumatized to try other PHP editors, and (2) I'm doing a lot of side-by-side HTML/CSS and PHP editing.

edit: Dreamweaver 8 supports manual code folding, sort of (it doesn't really read document structure, you have to select text). Also, Zend Studio is written in Java which inexperienced developers think is overly slow. Any computer from the last three years runs Java IDEs nice and fast with enough RAM (any major IDE needs a lot of RAM). Any computer made recently, you can't really tell the difference between native and virtual machine code.

That 1.2 GHz processor is what is killing you. 2 GHz minimum, unless it's a Pentium M. You should also have 1 GB of RAM for serious development. I have 1 GB (would have two, but already used all four slots) on my desktop and my tablet has 1.5 GB of RAM (OneNote eats RAM like there's no tomorrow, and being a developer doesn't help).

<a href="http://www.textpad.com/" target="_blank">Text Pad</a> is what I use. It is great. ^_^

I like Edit plus sometimes I forget to backup before make changes to any php file and editplus keep me out of big trouble by making a backup of the file for me.

For non-projects, I think I'll stick with PHP Designer 2005; I just wish it had code folding + the tabs weren't buggy.

For projects, I'm still not sure, right now I'm going between Zend and TruStudio. TS is starting to grow on me, I just don't like the fact you can't code fold all control structures, and it is pretty confusing... for me at least.

So far I'd say Zend is the best all in one solution (TruStudio doesn't support other web languages that I need nor can it run SQL [that I could find anyway])...

By the way, TruStudio runs very fast on my machine, it is java based too. filburt, why are you traumatized by other PHP editors? Also, have you looked at PHP Designer?

I figure I'll upgrade around Christmas time.

http://crimsoneditor.com/ for me :)

He lives! LTNS! Or was it me that was lost? Good to see ya.

I do like eclipse - It's "Quickfix" feature is handy when you get stuck on Java :D

I should have said that "I was unaware of anydecent program that performs that function" :p

Chris

I have yet to use an IDE for months on end without wanting to smash my keyboard at the random stupid things it does. For Zend Studio, it was a lot of bugs. The worst one was it would randomly outdent an entire block of code, destroying the first four characters of each line in the process.

PHP Designer looks interesting. I'll try it out.

Edit Plus2 for me ;)

TextPad on PC. So far I have used TextWrangler on Mac, but I'm now switching to TextMate. :)

Crimson was good for a while, but UltraEdit-32 is the best IMHO.

I'll check out Crimson and UltraEdit too, it seems they are popular.

IMO the default settings are terrible on PHP Designer, they take some tweaking to be bearable, for me anyway.

About Zend, you can't really say it is terrible, it has some features no other programs has, and for that I'll still use it in certain scenarios; regardless of the bugs.

You might want to check here: http://www.php-editors.com/

Nice site with pretty much all the php editors out there :)

Thanks,
Mat

I use .Edit