Searching For A Good PHP Development Environment?

kill-9.ws asks: "I'm a PHP developer, and up until this point, I've been using either Pico or EMACS to write all of my code. A text editor is fine for writing PHP, but I'm starting to look for more. I'd like to have some nice things like an editor that can do syntax highlighting for PHP and perhaps a function reference. Throw in a built-in FTP client, and that would be perfect. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?"

Comments

Here are some editors with PHP syntax highlighting

[buttfucker2000]

Windows
Good:
Php Coder - builtin interpreter and function reference
EditPlus
Bad:
MPS PHP Editor
Indifferent:
HTML-Kit
Unix

*strike*code warrior*strike*Latte*strike*Glimmer

- this is the best notepad-style (with tabs for multiple files) Unix text editor - extensible, with adjustable background images, etc., scriptable in Python
[note the syntax highlighting file is suboptimal -

should be

Crossplatform
Emacs
Vim (PHP highlighting not very good)

But basically my personal recommendations:
syntax highlighting good, all else redundant

So choose the best editor out there; there's not much else you can do with PHP - it's not WYSIWYG suitable, and the functions are so high level, things *like* dialog editors are redundant. As for ftp, I strongly recommend that if you're on Unix, you install your system's PHP & Apache packages, and on Windows install PHP Triad, an integrated MySQL/PHP/Apache installer. This way you don't have to worry about FTP till you're finished [just a warning: always make sure your local PHP is *older* (or the same) as the one on the web server - v3, apart from having fewer functions, also has a lot of weird and undocumented bugs and misfeatures - e.g., you get errors if you call something $file (or class file); in v4 you can instantiate

class classname {
// No constructor
}

with $object=new classname();
but v3 only allows brackets when the class has a constructor.

Here's how I work:

editor w/syntax highlighting, editing files direct - so much nicer than FTP, and without the FTP problems
browser window set to PHP manual (locally, for speed)
browser set to view PHP pages (Opera is good for this purpose because of its MDI (hint: use 4 and 5 to tab between windows), which generally sucks, but is good in this case cos you don't have to open lots of windows)

Bluefish, Quanta

[mitchy]

Bluefish is more of a gnome-based editor. Quanta is kde2, I think.

Both rock, although I like Bluefish the best (Olivier, you rock!) Supports projects (collections of files) and you can create your own highlighting rules. Has a function list build in, and a whole host of other features.

Besides, I can run bluefish from within sawfish, after eating monkfish and pulling a stalefish on the way back to the office.

I happen to like TextPad

[dmatos]

It has syntax highlighting for just about every language available, as well as the ability to create your own, by writing a .syn file.

TextPad has actually become my text editor of choice. I use it for everything from writing/compiling Java to viewing log files. There is a free trial version (full version costs $27, I think) at the TextPad Site.

PS - Windows only, methinks.

K PHP Develop

[Jason W]

There hasn't been much activity from the project lately, and I haven't tried it myself, but from the screenshots it looks like just what you need. SourceForge project page, and homepage.

Re:Emacs is all you want aparently.

[ksheff]

In addition to ftp, there is ssh/scp support with the tramp package at ftp://ls6-ftp.cs.uni-d ort mund.de/pub/src/emacs/tramp.tar.gz.

The following links may be useful for writing php code in emacs:

• http://funq.org/turadg/software/,
• http://www-publi c.t u-bs.de:8080/~y0008422/krabutzig/emacsphp.html,
• http://www.ontosys.com/reports/PHP.html

BBEdit for the Mac

[waldoj]

Since you didn't say that you wanted it for Linux...

BBEdit for the Mac is fantastic. BBEdit 6.0 has PHP syntax highlighting, built-in FTP, and even breaks each page down into sections by function. If I could get a decent PHP editor (read as: BBEdit...I've tried lots of others) for Linux, I swear I'd switch to it as my primary desktop environment.

-Waldo

PHP and HTML

[Chacham]

I wish some editor would allow the mix of both HTML and PHP, supporting echoing HTML from PHP. I'ts a tall order but it would sure make it _a lot_ easier.