On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 6:08 AM, Tod listacctc@gmail.com wrote:
Is there an IDE that the MW developer community has settled on and can recommend?
There is no magic bullet. :)
In the early days I mostly used fairly lightweight syntax-highlighting program editors (bbedit on Mac, jedit on Linux/Windows, joe or vim if stuck in a terminal) and a command line for grep & version control, and that was Good Enough For Me.
I mostly use Netbeans these days -- like Eclipse it's an open-source pluggable Java-based IDE mega-framework, but I've found it more stable and comfortable to use than Eclipse. Its PHP & JavaScript mode does decent highlighting, it has standard integration with SVN and Git, and it handles project navigation, autocomplete etc including extracting type information from doc comment annotations. Most importantly, project-wide search and replace works and is speedy enough compared to mucking about with find and grep.
Some folks around the office also use Eclipse. The downside of either of these is that they're huge apps -- they eat memory for breakfast, and if they're unstable can be very frustrating. The upside is that they tend to be very flexible, but much less intimidating than classic Unixy stuff like vim or emacs.
Others are still very happy with a lighter-weight programming editor: something in the GUI flavors like TextMate or bbedit (Mac), Kate or gedit (Linux), or whatever the heck Windows people use.
Some hardcore people use a terminal-based editor like vim or emacs by choice; the best of these are extremely powerful with syntax & navigation features though they tend to have a higher learning curve.
The most important things you probably want in a programming environment are:
* project-wide search & search-and-replace (you will kill yourself playing with 'grep' without this) * PHP & JavaScript syntax highlighting (a must) * quick way to pop around to other files in the project by name/path (even if just from a command line)
Some folks will care also about: * version control integration (all I ever use is a 'svn annotate' shortcut!) * debugger integration (if/when you can actually make it work, AWESOME) * autocompletion assistance (it's a help but if you can navigate around or look up help easily, it's not key) * integration with language & library documentation (if you know your way around php.net, no biggie)
-- brion