Like most developers, I’m a fan of free development tools – Eclipse, Aptana Studio, and Notepad++, for example. I do own UltraEdit, which I bought a few years ago and have upgraded occasionally. But I think I’m hooked on an IDE that is going to cost me some money: Jetbrains’ PHPStorm.
I learned about PHPStorm from a quick review of WebStorm (a subset of PHPStorm) by Jeffrey Way over on the nettuts+ site. The new IDEs do real-time syntax-highlighting and error-checking on CSS, HTML, PHP, Javascript, (although it doesn’t seem to be particularly JQuery-aware – a minor quibble) and SQL. It supports several version-control tools (CVS, subversion, GIT), is highly configurable, and from what I’ve seen so far, very fast.
I particularly like the way JetBrains has implemented tag matching. In fact, this is the first editor I’ve tried that does it in a simple, intuitive and reliable way. The screen capture below shows the result of clicking next to the closing > of the form tag. The editor finds the corresponding closing tag and highlights everything in between. Simple. And, of course, all those structures can be collapsed and expanded as needed.
[By the way, the dark color scheme is one of many available from the JetBrains site; the default is sort of bland-on-white. Skins are available here for JetBrains' Ruby IDE, RubyMine, but they work for this IDE too. Download the skin's JAR file, store it in C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\.WebIde10\config\colors. Open the IDE and use File | Import Settings to install the skin and File | Settings | Editor | Colors & Fonts to select the newly-installed scheme from the dropdown list.]
So what’s it going to cost me? Hard to say – the Java IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) is $249 for a personal license (there is a free, lightweight version) while RubyMine is $99. Let’s hope it’s more in line with RubyMine than IntelliJ IDEA. Want to give it a whirl? Download PHPStorm or WebStorm here. Have fun!
Thanks for the mini-review. WebIDE (as its known on twitter) recently stated that the pricing would model that of RubyMine. So expect a $99 price point. Awesome! I think its well worth it.
Its been over a month since you’ve wrote this post. Whats your view of PHPStorm now? jQuery still giving you troubles?
Thanks, for the info, Max; I was hoping for $99. I still use it regularly for everything but quick edits. I do wish they’d implement word wrap though. I’m at the point where if UltraEdit implements tag matching before PHPStorm/WebStorm implements word wrap, I’ll switch back to UltraEdit. Missing one or the other is a hassle.