Text Editors Are Cool But I Use an IDE To Get Shit Done

My first entrance into IDE’s was Visual Studio 2005. While I started out with PHP my entrance into Web Development was Asp/Asp.net. The reason was drag and drop. While I love to code (I should say addicted) I love getting paid more. I get paid to get my job done. About 3-4 years ago I started learning Ruby on Rails. Using terminal plus a text editor (Textmate at the time) plus migrations/generators was a great way to develop Web Applications. I bit the bullet almost immediately until I wanted to host my app. Back in those days it was a pain. Today Heroku makes it easier but if you don’t want to go down the Heroku route it’s still a pain. I’m sorry if that pisses off any ROR devs but using another language to put your app on a server is ridiculous. Anyway enough of the ROR ranting and onto why I use IDE’s. I’m a Webmaster which means that I’m pretty much the everything guy. From design, SEO, IT to development I run the show. My time is limited and I tend to work on multiple websites from WordPress to Eccommerce and everything in between. I’ve worked with just about every PHP framework under the sun and have tended to use text editors such as Sublime Text 2 to get the job done because IDE php framework  support has been pretty shitty. That all changed when I started using Phpstorm. I’ve been using the early access version of Phpstorm 6 since day one primarily because of the new Dracula dark theme. Before I go on let me explain that 1. I hate ugly editors. I cannot stand working in battleship grey IDE’s that are visually ugly. Which is why eclipse based editors are a no go for me. I spend too much time wondering why my gutter is so wide and why in hell is the status bar so tall. 2. I have to use a dark themed editor. Maybe I’m crazy but I work anywhere from 15 to sometimes 20 hours on the computer and feel as though dark themes don’t strain my eyes. Okay with that out of the way Phpstorm is a lightning fast smart son of a &*#$# IDE. I’ve got everything that I need from amazing intellisense (if Phpstorm can figure out Magento’s crap codebase then you know it’s good), ftp/sftp, database support, remote file support, amazing css and javascript support to a plugin system and everything else jam packed into a (currently) $100 dollar package.  Code navigation, refactoring and debugging is the best I’ve ever used not to mention I have not experienced a single bug. Yes, not one. Which is strange because even Sublime Text is victim to it’s unresponsive plugin popup and occasional hickup.  If you haven’t give Phpstorm a try I highly recommend that you do because just about everything is a keyboard shortcut away from getting done.

Tags

IDE