I’ve been coding in PHP for quite some time now, and I’m still trying to come up with the best editor for my workflow. I have even written about this particular issue before.

For the past few years, I’ve been using PSPad as my editor. PSPad is a great text editor, and has practically everything I need, but lately due to the sometimes hectic pace of some projects, I’ve come to miss actual debugging with breakpoints and such.

I’ve been using breakpoints in debugging since I was in 6th grade. As far as I am concerned, if you’re a programmer that doesn’t know how to use a debugger, then you need some additional training.

For the purpose of finding a “better” editor, I downloaded a bunch of them, installed, and checked them out. I did end up forking over a wad of cash for an editor, and I’m still wondering if I made the right choice.

Before everyone goes nutty screaming “Eclipse” at me, I need to convey my utterly sincere desire to never have anything to do with Java ever again. It eats memory needlessly, it doesn’t run nearly as well as it should, and the UI (although perhaps not in the case of Eclipse) leaves much to be desired. In any case, Java apps don’t run on my PC, ever.

I tried out ActiveState’s Komodo 4.0, but it wasn’t to my liking. If I’m going to shift to a full IDE, I expect some tools to be integrated. The debugger was nice, but there wasn’t much else to this software, in spite of all of the features they tout.

I tried Waterproof’s PHPEdit, which seemed like a capable editor. The debugger seemed robust enough, and there were a few nice little things (that I didn’t appreciate until wondering where they had gotten to while using other programs), but the code insight was a little lacking. I forget the exact circumstance, but PHPEdit was not able to provide insight for some basic class methods that I thought it should. This is primarily what caused me to move on from PHPEdit, once again because if you’re going to build an IDE, let’s make sure those features work right, right?

Zend makes an IDE called Zend Studio, but I discounted this one solely based on the screenshots. I suppose this is not the wisest thing to do, but they seemed lacking to me, at least in that the UI of the software seemed very dated. Is this due to some need to remain cross-platform?

I moved on to NuSphere’s PHPEd. It has the code-completion I was looking for, and a working, integrated debugger. The profiler was what really sold me on PHPEd, since I could run through a specific code path and see what was taking the most time to execute. Some other nice features included SSH console integration (handy when working with files on a server), and integration with MySQL. Pretty spiffy.

I tried a couple of other editors that weren’t worth mentioning. Some had syntax highlighting that didn’t work, or other weird features that were the focus of their work, but didn’t add any value over the basic debugging and editing support that they were missing.