Good Symfony Editor Netbeans or Eclipse? [closed]

Question

I am looking for a good editor for a Symfony2 project and other projects. I really don't need the fancyness or thousands of scripts loading, etc. I personally prefer easy and clean structured IDE - that's why I actually always tend to close Eclipse.

I am running Mamp on a Macbook with OS X Lion.

Currently I always go back to Komodo. So my question is: What are the advantages of having Symfony support in Eclipse and Netbeans (I actually tried both)?

I don't mind editing and going back and forth between the editor and the browser. I never really understood why there needs to be a huge application for that. I just can't see any advantages other than the code intelligence, and integrated subversion tools in the editors. Can anybody agree on that?

Answer 1

I use NetBeans too which works well even with Symfony 2. You don't need to set anything, just create a new PHP project from existing Symfony folder. You'll get autocomplete for classes and validation check for YAML (if you use it, of course).

For Twig you can install this plugin which gives you syntax highlight and nothing more. This is enough for me. The only problem I found is that Twig templates are hard to read if you use some dark (and cool) NetBeans theme: you should use default black on white one.

I don't recommend Eclipse even with Symfony2 plugin: works really bad and it takes minutes to install. The only good feature (I can't get in NetBeans) is custom commands for generating entities, install assets and so on.

Answer 2

I use NetBeans for all my PHP projects, including symfony 1.x stuff. I used to use Eclipse but found that auto-complete would hang from time to time - though they may have fixed that. Both are memory hungry and seem to hang onto RAM increasingly over time, hence both need restarts periodically if you are in the habit of sleeping your machine rather than turning it off.

The autocompletion is pretty good in NetBeans, anyway, so I've stuck with it. I agree on your assessment of framework support in IDEs generally - it may be nice to have, but I'm happy with the CLI.