Do you use a PHP IDE? [closed]

Question

I've programmed for six years, and in that time, I've never used a PHP IDE. I feel perfectly fine using Vim, the Linux shell, MySQL command line and Subversion command line for my web application development. When I'm asked to work on other people's projects, or open source projects, I can generally find my way around after a quick system architecture overview.

Recently, I was curious about PHP IDEs. I downloaded NetBeans, but I lost patience debugging installation problems.

It makes me wonder, will my productivity increase substantially with the use of a good PHP IDE? What percentage of LAMP/PHP developers use a PHP IDE?

Answer 1

I always use an IDE now, if it supports refactoring. I may use it in addition to, or alongside, Vim or Emacs, but refactoring is now an integral part of my development style and having automated refactoring tools is essential.

If you're only going to use the editor features of whatever IDE you choose, you probably won't benefit much. The benefit is when:

• the IDE can do for us something that would take us much longer, OR
• the IDE provides information that we would otherwise need to work to find

Answer 2

I have used NetBeans in the past for PHP projects and liked it a lot. The fact I liked it is just my opinion, but I don't remember having any install issues. NetBeans synced up great with my teams SVN server and things worked smoothly.

Answer 3

I use Eclipse. It's bloated, unwieldy, slow and quirky, but I find that it has some features that make me a better/faster developer. The two main things I like about developing PHP with Eclipse are:

• Function documentation tooltips. Given that PHP lacks a standard parameter order for a lot of things, this is especially useful with the str family of functions. I don't have to remember whether a particular function order is ($haystack,$needle) or ($needle,$haystack), I can just type the name of the function and hover over it.
• "Jump into" functionality. Highlight a function and hit 'F3', and it will take you to the class or file where that function is defined. This is extremely helpful.

There's other features that are useful as well, although not as profound. Things like autocomplete and PHPDoc comment templates (type /** and it creates a basic block comment pre-filled with your parameters) tend to be handy.

Due to deficiencies with Eclipse, I tend to develop with multiple tools. For example, I find UltraEdit's "Find in multiple files" functionality to be excellent (as well as "edit in Column mode" for batch SQL edits), and I usually have it running alongside Eclipse.

I've tried NetBeans several times, but each time I've installed it in the past, the internal PHP function documentation has been broken, so hovering over any built-in PHP function results in an intellisense box saying "PHPDoc Not Found". I found that extremely aggravating, and each time have gone back to Eclipse. I like the looks of it, but I need that functionality (a vague reference to it on some forum has one of the developers saying that the build script is broken so it's not linking the docs properly, but they had yet to fix it as of my last attempt).