PHP/HTML editor

Coda here. Eyecandy for developers

On the Mac side I’ve installed the Textmate bundle for Textmate. It let’s me hit cmd-ctrl-E and edit any text field in Textmate in Coacoa apps like Safari. (There’s a similar plugin for Firefox available.) When I’m done I simply hit the save key-combo and it magically transports it back to the text area. There’s a comparable thing for E as well.

I think I’m in love.

Run, do not walk, and try it out. (Now it’s time for that MODx bundle for Textmate/E).

Quote from: smashingred at Jun 25, 2007, 03:15 AM

@Eleventeen,

Don’t you find DW8 resource heavy? I am not suggesting you change but since you would be spending most of your time in code view don’t you find it uses a lot of system resources? That was m reason for seeking other apps. I spend 99.00% of my time in code view and therefore didn’t need all the other junk that came with it just to run. If I had Fireworks or Photoshop open it would bring my system to a crawl.

That being said ,it took me a long time to come off DW. I started on DW3 and only stopped using it shortly after DW MX2004 came out.

Actually, yes. And the CS3 trial absolutely kills my system (2GB RAM, 1.8gHz core duo) even when doing basic things like opening a 30 line file. I’ve been hooked on DW since the MX 2004 version came out and haven’t been able to get away from it. I DID happen to try out Notepad++ and I use it for smaller things like XML and JS, but when I’m working with 5-6 files at once and constantly modifying and viewing them it gets to be a pain unless they can "instantly" be updated without any further thought. Other than that though, all the other junk in DW goes unused (for me at least).

@Ryan: That sounds sweet! I was thinking about switching to a Mac awhile back but the thought of learning a whole new beast after being everyone’s "PC guy" since the time of Windoze 95 seems... daunting to me. In other words, I’m too scared to switch.

My web development is:

Eclipse 3.2 and the following plugins:
* Aptana
- CSS, HTML, JS, php
- debugger, support for ftp and sync
- code completion, folding, etc
- major JS integration, debugging, live preview
- CSS contextual help for browsers (Opera, Safari, IE, Firefox....)
- ...many more
- Adobe Air support

* RadRails
- best tool for Ruby on Rails development
- debugger, plugins, server, generators

* Flex Builder 3
- Apollo and Air integration

* SVN Tigris

* PDT Tools (from Zend) - PHP Development Toolkit
- debugger, etc...

* SQL Explorer
- for mySQL

What I suggest for those that are complaining about resources:
- eclipse.ini - tweak the values for min and max memmory use.
- Help--> Software Updates --> Manage configuration:
Here you can choose what plugin to be installed/ disabled. And if you not using a plugin, you can simply disable it.
- After upgrating different plugins, eclipse do not replace the old version of it. It will keep it so you can come back to it at any time. If is everything allright, you can removethose old versions.

I use these both on XP machine and Vista Ultimate (many say that Eclipse or Aptana don’t work on Vista - I post dirrection to follow in the Aptana forums for problems with RadRails on Vista. But for those of you who have the updated versions seems ok - no more problems).

Servers: InstantRails and XAMPP.

For direction: Download Aptana IDE with RadRails (or single). Unzip. Add in Help-->Software Updates-->Find and Install--> Search for new features:
http://update.aptana.com/install/air/3.2/ - for Adobe Air
http://update.aptana.com/update/xul - Aptana Firefox Preview
http://download.eclipse.org/technology/dash/update/ - Aptana Monkey
http://downloads.zend.com/pdt - PDT Tools (from Zend) - PHP Development Toolkit
EMF and GEF do not need to be installed completely. But PDT require some package from those. When PDT say that in order to install you need EMF and GEF, click on "Select required" and the packages will be automatically selected.
http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/updates/site.xml - EMF (Eclipse modeling framework)
http://download.eclipse.org/tools/gef/update-site/releases/site.xml - GEF
http://eclipsesql.sourceforge.net - SQL Explorer ( you also will need form Mysql.com the jdbc driver for mysql)
http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x - Subeclipse
http://update.aptana.com/install/rails/3.2/ - RadRails

I hope that this will help you. Good day.

Thanks for the tips on using the Eclipse environment. Keep ’em going, it helped a lot.

I’ve been using Eclipse for the last couple of weeks when writing PHP and I love it! If not for the fact that I use DW for WYSIWYG editing, I think I would just ditch that program and only use Eclipse.

@nlcluigi - I’ll have to check Aptana out for css/js stuff.

I like to use and recommend Codelobster IDE.
It has very good HTML/CSS/JS/PHP autocomplete.

Oooh autocomplete sounds perfect for my needs

I write HTML in PhpStorm. It has nice autocomplete for tags and excellent built-in HTML syntax checking (it will even check JavaScript code inside of script tags), but no WYSIWYG display other than the option to display the page in any of your installed browsers.

It does have a nice side-by-side display for Markup code with code on one side and the output on the other, and there's talk of them adding that feature for HTML.

+1 phpstorm

I'd been using sublime for YEARS and kept hearing phpstorm mentioned. I made the swap some months ago just because of the better jsx support than sublime. I soon discovered it's far superior in a lot of things too.