Ok, I’ve been on a hunt for a while. So long, in fact, I think it actually qualifies as a quest.

The prey? A good PHP IDE to work in. Not just an editor, not just a project manager, but the whole deal. I need everything with the exception of local debugging. I’ve come very close a couple of times, but never can seem to get everything in one package.

Here’s my wishlist:

• Good Syntax Highlighting, customizable with regex available
• Function hinting that contains all of php’s core functions, and adds functions from the project as well
• Built-in ftp with local sync, dreamweaver style
• Project management at a simple level, not too much, just let me setup a dir as a project
• Recognition of multiple languages in one file

Thats the beef of it. There are other convenience features I would like to see, of course, but those are the winners for me. I’ve found each of those in different programs, but have yet to find 1 program with all of that.

The first 2 are found in PHP Designer 2007, wonderful syntax highlighting and the best function hints I’ve seen. If an include is part of a project, all of its functions will be hinted, so you don’t have to think about parameter order. The last 2 are also part of PHP Designer, but they don’t stand out near as well as the other two. Why don’t I just use PHP Designer then? Its buggy. At random time, the document tabs will just quit working, and you cant load or close a document, so you have to close the program and reload. If it didn’t do it 3 or 4 times a day, it wouldn’t be so bad, but it really interrupts the work flow.

The FTP sync is another big one. I would like something that works like dreamweaver. Load from server, save locally, save to server. This helps in a couple of ways. 1, its faster then going back and forth between editor and ftp client. 2, and more importantly, you always have the freshest file, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally overwriting someones changes. I’ve found a few OS utilities that do it, NetDrive/WebDrive, for example, set an ftp drive as a local drive. This is nice, and works well, but there is no way to sync a local dir to the ftp dir, so you would have the local backup. Also, in XP, both of these programs have caused me an instant restart randomly when copying files. It’s rare, but there’s nothing like going from editor to the bios post in a second to screw up your thought process.

Right now, I pretty much use textpad. Its the only simple editor I like, and I’ve tried them all. Its lacking in some areas, but makes up for it in others. Its search, find/replace, and comparison tools are excellent, and make up for the fact that there is no regex matching in the syntax highlighting (ie, no way to make php $vars highlight). I’ve probably tried 20 different applications, to no avail. I always end up back in TextPad with AbsoluteFTP. It works, and it has worked for a couple of years now with no problems, I guess its just human to want a little more than you have.

If anyone knows of an editor that meets all of those prerequisites, drop me a comment or Contact Me.

Posted in Development |