What is the best IDE for PHP

Question

I m a PHP developer and now I use Notepad   for code editing  but lately I ve been searching for an IDE to ease my work   I ve looked into Eclipse  Aptana Studio and several others  but I m not really decided  they all look nice enough but a bit complicated  I m sure it ll all get easy once I get used to it  but I don t want to waste my time   This is what I m looking for        FTP support     Code highlight     SVN support would be great     Ruby and JavaScript would be great

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Have you looked at Delphi for PHP   lt http   www codegear com products delphi php        Joe Stagner of Microsoft really likes Delphi for PHP  He says it here    Delphi for PHP  2 0 is the REAL DEAL and I LOVE IT

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There is a new guy in town  PhpStorm from JetBrains  You use it and I bet you will forget all the other editors  It s bit pricey though  unfortunately

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NetBeans is pretty nice because it has syntax highlighting  tabs  auto-formatting and live syntax verification  Sadly  you cannot save in UTF-8 without having to set up  projects     How annoying  I wonder if there is another editor that has syntax highlighting  tabs  auto-formatting and live syntax verification but would also allow me to use UTF-8 without having to set up  projects

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I believe that PHP being what it is  doesn t really require an IDE  I use vi  it is fast  doesn t crash and with grep -r and Ctags  it can multiply productivity many times over   Subversion is literally built-in in the console  so you won t run into problems with source control   Finally  I used springloops com as the repositories  so I don t have have to manually FTP files to any server  It has a FTP deployment option which also makes sure that only the altered file move to the staging server   The best part is that you can go to a friends house  find a Linux machine  and just start developing because everything that you need is mostly available on most machines

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I ve tried Eclipse PDT  with some success  Aptana is also pretty good  or if you are doing a lot of AJAX stuff  it s great  Your mileage may vary  however  depending on what additional plugins you want to use with them

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I have a friend who swears by Aptana Studio

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I m using Zend Studio  It has decent syntax highlighting  code completion and such  But the best part is that you can debug PHP code  either with a standalone PHP interpreter  or even on a live web server as you  browse  along your pages  You get the usual Visual Studio keys  breakpoints  watches and call stack  which is almost indispensable for bug hunting  No more  alert   -cluttered debugged source code

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PHPEclipse is as close to Eclipse java power as it could get  Eclipse PDT is much weaker  last time I checked

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RadPHP  previously known as Delphi for PHP  is the best

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Aptana supports this and I use it for all of my web development now

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What features of an IDE do you want  Integrated build engine  Debugger  Code highlighting  IntelliSense  Project management  Configuration management  Testing tools  Except for code highlighting  none of these are in your requirements   So my suggestion is to use an editor that supports plugins  like Notepad    which you are already used to   If there s not already a plugin that does what you want  then write one   I use Coda on Mac nbsp OS nbsp X

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I m always amazed that more people don t use ActiveState Komodo   It has the best debugging facilities of any PHP IDE I have tried  is a very mature product and has more useful features than you can shake a stick at  Of note  it has a fantastic HTTP inspector  Javascript debugger and Regular Expression Toolkit  You can get it so that it steps through your PHP  then you see your Javascript running  and then see your HTTP traffic going out over the wire    It also comes in free  Komodo Edit  and open  OpenKomodo versions     Oh  and if you don t always hack just on PHP  it s designed as a multi-language editor and rocks for Ruby and Python too   I ve been a happy customer for around 5 years

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There s no  best  IDE  only better and worse ones   Right now I m trying to settle in with Aptana  It has a lot of cruft that I don t want  like  Jaxer  doodads all over the place  It s reasonably fast  but chokes on large files when syntax highliting is on  I have not been able to figure out how to set up PHP debugging  Three good things about Aptana  easy plugin installations  very fast and intuitive Subversion plugins  ligning fast file search    I tried Eclipse PDT and Zend for Eclipse  but they have nightmare levels of interface cruft  Installing plugins is a living horror of version mismatches and cryptic error messages   I also use Komodo  they bought us licenses at work   Komodo has a very intuitive interface  but is ridiculously slow  chokes on medium sized files with syntax highlighting  File search is intuitive  but rather slow  Subversion integration is not that great - slow and buggy   If not for slowness  I would have probably stuck with Komodo  especially for the debugger

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Eclipse PDT is very nice

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For PHP I would recommend PhpStorm   It supports FTP SFTP synchronization  integrates well with Subversion  CVS  Mercurial and even with Git  Also  it supports HTML  CSS  JavaScript and handles language-mixing well like SQL or HTML blocks inside PHP code  JSON  etc   But if you need Ruby you can try another IDE - RubyMine with same capabilities but for Ruby

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Geany is a great lightweight editor -- like Notepad   for Linux  only better  I find this  combined with a few shell scripts and symlinks for linking modules into a web source tree  make developing on Linux easy and fun

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Have you tried NetBeans 6  Zend Studio and NetBeans 6 are the best IDEs with PHP support you ll come across and NetBeans is free

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Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 is very easy to use  It is having the feature of code highlighting  and show the files which you have included in the parent file in separate tabs  having the option of php net offline  That means if you want to know about the new built-in functions just Ctrl   space  It will show the drop down  It is having the syntax and also the offline preview of the syntax from php net

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I love JetBrains IDEs  For PHP it is JetBrains PHPStorm

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I m using PHPDesigner but I will go for Eclipse PDT  I was always against Eclipse until few months ago when I have one Java project to finish    Great IDE  Now I can t imagine one day without Eclipse

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Too bad no one mentioned phpDesigner  It s really the best IDE I ve came across  and I believe I ve tried them all   The main pro of this one is that it s NOT Java based  This keeps the whole thing quick  Features   Intelligent Syntax Highlighter - automatic switch between PHP  HTML  CSS  and JavaScript depending on your position  PHP  both version 4 and 5 are supported  SQL  MySQL  MSSQL 2000  MSSQL 7  Ingres  Interbase 6  Oracle  Sybase  HTML XHTML CSS  both version 1 and 2 1 are supported  JavaScript VBScript Java C  Perl Python Ruby Smarty  PHP   Support for both PHP 4 and PHP 5 Code Explorer for PHP  includes  classes  extended classes  interfaces  properties  functions  constants and variables  Code Completion  IntelliSense  for PHP - code assist as you type Code Tip  code hint  for PHP - code assist as you type Work with any PHP frameworks  access classes  functions  variables  etc  on the fly  PHP object oriented programming  OOP  including nested objects Support for PHP heredoc Enclose strings with single- or double quotes  linefeed  carriage return or tabs PHP server variables PHP statement templates  if  else  then  while     Powerful PHP Code Beautifier with many configurations and profile support phpDocumentor wizard Add phpDocumentor documentation to functions and classes with one click  phpDocumentor tags Comment or uncomment with one click  Jump to any declaration with filtering by classes  interfaces  functions  variables or constants  Debug  PHP    Debug with Xdebug Breakpoints Step by step debugging Step into Step over Run to cursor Run until return Call stack Watches Context variables Evaluate Profiling Multiple sessions Evaluation tip Catch errors

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Personally everything that is based uppon Eclipse or NetBeans is an overkill  the GUI is crap and the performance is soooo slow compared to other alternatives   If you re willing to pay I would suggest Zend IDE  version 5 5  not 6 because it s based on Eclipse  and EditPlus for a more lightweight yet powerfull code editor   If you re looking for free alternatives  or if you code in other languages other than PHP  OpenKomodo is a really nice IDE with almost all the features  no SVN neither CVS  that you require  the only con I see about OpenKomodo is that sometimes it messes my code indentation  but then again I don t use it on a very regular basis   As for a free lightweight alternative  Notepad

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Eclipse with PDT

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Are you sure you re looking for an IDE   The features you re describing  along with the impression of being too complicated that you got from e g  Aptana  suggest that perhaps all you really want is a good editor with syntax highlighting and integration with some common workflow tools   For this  there are tons of options   I ve used jEdit on several platforms successfully  and that alone puts it above most of the rest  many of the IDEs are cross-platform too  but Aptana and anything Eclipse-based is going to be pretty heavy-weight  if full-featured    jEdit has ready-made plugins for everything on your list  and syntax highlighting for a wide range of languages   You can also bring up a shell in the bottom of your window  invoke scripts from within the editor  and so forth   It s not perfect  the UI is better than most Java UIs  but not perfect yet I don t think   but I ve had good luck with it  and it ll be a hell of a lot simpler than Aptana Eclipse   That said  I do like Aptana quite a bit for web development  it does a lot of the grunt work for you once you re over the learning curve

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Best of all  Notepad      Free and helpful with colors and link   Average  NetBeans     Normal IDE  Not good  Eclipse      It crashes when you don t wait for it  Oh and I forget  Don t ever use JDeveloper  D

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The best IDE for PHP in my opinion is Zend Studio  which itself is based on Eclipse PDT   Note that in this case  best  does not necessarily mean  good   It is slow and a bit buggy  but even so  it s still the best option for PHP programmers  I ve tried a ton of PHP editors over the years and I haven t yet found one that works great   Komodo IDE would be my second choice  My only problem with Komodo is that the autocomplete is not as good  With properly structured apps where you use phpDoc to document return types etc   it should be alright  But I work on a project that doesn t really do that and Komodo can t read across files to know that  user is a User object for example

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My opinion is that the best for PHP is RadPHP

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Hands down the best IDE for PHP is NuSphere PHPEd   It s a no contest   It is so good that I use WINE to run it on my Mac   PHPEd has an awesome debugger built into it that can be used with their local webserver  totally automatic  or you can just install the dbg module for XAMPP or any other Apache you want to run

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To get you started  here is a list of PHP Editors  Wikipedia

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For PHP in particular  PHPEdit is the best  and I tried and worked in some of them including  Dreamweaver  Elipse  Emacs  Notepad    NetBeans  UltraEdit

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I would recommend Zend IDE for the integrated debugger

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http   www ibm com developerworks opensource library os-php-ide index html  Personally  I love Notepad       D   The above link compares some of the better IDEs and the best ones aren t free   I d recommend Komodo 4 4 though  I used the trial version  since it was awesome  Better than Notepad    but not free

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Dreamweaver

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There are a few IDEs out there you can use  I personally like UltraEdit  It does syntax highlighting  FTP SFTP support  super fast  macros  etc  - only  30    If you re doing anything heavy and would like some enterprise level IDE features  local remote debugging  framework support  IntelliSense   try Zend IDE  I believe it s a few hundred dollars but be worth it   There s also a plugin for Eclipse you try  PHPEclipse I think   I hope this helps

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All are good  but only Delphi for PHP  RadPHP 3 0  has a designer  drag and drop controls  GUI editeor  huge set of components including Zend Framework  Facebook  database  etc  components  It is the best in town   RadPHP is the best of all  It has all the features the others have  Its designer is the best of all  You can design your page just like Dreamweaver  more than Dreamweaver    If you use RadPHP you will feel like using ASP NET with Visual Studio  but the language is PHP    It s too bad only a few know about this

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NetBeans  Check out 7 0 1    It supports FTP SFTP synchronization  integrates well with Subversion  CVS  Mercurial and even with Git  with plugin   Also  it supports HTML  CSS  JavaScript  popular frameworks and more   And its free

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Why Dreamweaver - 2  For current work I prefer Dreamweaver rather than another editor  I have tried a lot of editors  but in the end I stick with Dreamweaver

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I use and like Rapid PHP

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My personal preference is Eclipse  with various plug-ins  as I am developing in several languages  PHP  Java  and Ruby  and this way I am always used to interface and keyboard shortcuts  This is not a minor thing as you become very productive this way   I haven t used Aptana  but will  hopefully  soon - it does look interesting  though  For others IDEs I have used  jEdit  for little Java   Notepad    still for some scripting and short test code runs   And for the features You asked  Eclipse support many source code version servers  Subclipse   your project can be on a Samba share  ZendDebugger xdebug for debugging

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Just last night I finally bought the latest version of Zend Studio  I used previous versions and I was always very happy with it  I don t think you can undervalue the integration between their debugger and their Firefox and Internet nbsp Explorer toolbars  I use them constantly and they give me a great sense of how the application will run live     The latest version is built on Eclipse  so you get many of its features as a base which lets Zend focus on providing more advanced functionality  I like the way they have made Studio very PHP aware in the sense that once you start it up everything is geared toward developing PHP applications  It s knowledgeable about Zend Framework  PHPDoc  and PHP s newer OOP features   It has grown up along with PHP   You can get most of the same functionality from Eclipse or Eclipse PDT  but I always felt they provided me with so many options I couldn t actually do anything  Studio let me start building applications pretty quickly since that s about all it does     I think it meets most of your requests except for the Ruby part  I m sure you can add Ruby extensison to it since it is Eclipse  but I haven t tried that yet  Also  I think they recently improved the JavaScript coding as well  but I haven t tested it much so far

[php] What is the best IDE for PHP?

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