Sick of half-hearted editors?

[munkywrench]

OK.

I am sick of these efforts towards PHP Editors / IDEs. A lot of them are good, but they all seem to fail in one major area - GUI, usability, code completion, something is always wrong.

What I propose we do is create the last PHP Editor anyone will need. We are all coders right? Why isn't there something well designed that doesn't frustrate the heck out of us?

If anyone is interested, email me at munkywrench@gmail.com. I will assemble a team of developers and see where we go from there.

Thanks all.

[stuart]

Hi munkywrench,

Yep, you are correct - there is always something not quite good enough with editors/ide's. But remember that what you like and think is important other may not.... it's always the case with software.

Anyway - I totally agree that an editor that has all the good parts (I like) of the current ones, is needed. Well one that has the option to enable or disable all the features ever designed and useful

Why not start posting all the features you think should be there... and we could pass them on to the developers of current ones. I know that PHP Designer and Maguma are always looking for ideas, PHP Designer is Free and Maguma have a free version also.

So lets start posting all the requirements and see what happens, if all else fails then - getting together a team sound like a great idea.

Thanks for getting that off your chest munkywrench it's about time someone did.. lol

cheers

[munkywrench]

Thats just the problem. You can rattle of lists of features but whats the guarantee that anyone will DO anything about it?

[Jcx.Software]

We do! I've love to hear what kind of features are you looking in a Php IDE. We've work really hard to get the features ppl have asked us.

You can learn more about VS.Php here: http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php

[stuart]

Yep... I told you some PHP IDE developers are always looking for peoples opinion to make their software better... so let all get together some features we like and see what happens.

I'll start with a few of the favourites:

Code Highlighting for PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript (In the one script)
Debugger - Like the one Nusphere offer
Code Function/Block Folding
FTP Integration
CSV and maybe other Version Control Integration
Class/Function/Variable Explorer
Code Completion Optional
Project Explorer
File Explorer
Advanced Search and Replace (Support of Mulple Files/Folders)
Small Overheads and Fast Running

There is just a few of my favourite features...

[hedgehog]

not trying to troll, but as a lowly usability guy who also does a ton of php coding, the issue with most things of this nature which gets me all fussy is that there's too many attempts at being an end-all-be-all, kitchen-sink-included application.

my advice to any programmer making *any* non-commercial application is to put your needs first: create the thing exactly as you would want it.

i don't want microsoft office level bloat in a php editor. there's a ton of options as far as which editor i choose out there, and i like that.

make the thing the way you want, and if you take suggestions, only take the ones you think are relevant. if i like your methodology and think the way you look at an editor matches my own, i'll download it, love it, and probably live with it.

sure, syntax highlighting is nice, but if i had my way, i'd like to see block highlighting as well (select a block of text, right click, choose the background highlight color for that block).

you can /sort of/ do that in homesite, but not really.

that might be a feature none of you would ever want or use, but i've now wanted for ages. that said, i wouldn't want you putting it in your editor if you've no use for it: eventually i'll find one that's right for me.

just my .02 :]

[defaulk]

I agree with just about everything you all said. There are too many gimmick features out there. What is needed is some of the pretty basic important ones:

• Autoindenting that works properly! So many do a so-so job. If you do it like .net studio does, you're ahead of the game.
• Syntax Highlighting with different types (php, html, css, etc) in same script. Customizable highlighting would be a plus.
• Coding features: code outlining, intellisense. Class browser.
• Fast. Cut out the bloat. I don't care about changing the "skin" on my IDE for example.
• FTP/SSH integration would be nice--to the point where once you've turned it on, saving your file saves it locally and remotely.
• A good file browser would be nice. Again .net or eclipse style would be great.

Features that are terrible/useless:

• Menu items for common php code, like an if() block. Useless. Easier to type it.
• Bracket completion, Quote completion etc...could be useful if it were done really well. It just usually gets in the way

I didn't add to the list the things which I don't see the point of but others might like. For example, in my opinion, code snippets are just annoying. Cut-and-paste-coding usually means you aren't reusing code as you ought. Some others might like them.

Debuggers could be nice, but only in a real pinch. Usually they take forever to set up, don't always simulate the real environment well enough, and are usually overused to compensate for bad coding methods. I can only imagine how much of the IDE development time that could have been well spent elsewhere has been squandered on these.

WYSIWYG editors. What you see is NOT usually what you get anyway. But once again, this is probably good for some people. Personally, I would rather know HTML/CSS than try to learn how your particular wysiwyg thingy is supposed to "work".


In summary: anything that makes coding easier to do and see is what we care about. Anything that helps us with saving/managing that code (ftp, source control integration) are things that would be really nice to have.

Jcx.Software's VS.PHP does really well at most of this stuff btw. It's nice in that they are piggybacking off of a great IDE. While I liked their software, I would suggest a few things for them since they posted in here: customizable highlighting. What if I want to change the background color of php blocks for example and make identifiers maroon. Also: FTP integration would be nice. It's often necessary to test pages on the remote server. Make it easy and convenient for us to put them there.

[Jcx.Software]

Actually, you can customize the color coding in VS.Php. Just go to tools/options dialog.

Regarding FTP integration, VS.Php also allows you to copy your project to a linux server using Ftp, SFtp or regular file copying on top of Samba.

BTW VS.Php version 1.3 will include html intellisense.

[pfm]

Hi,

What about this:

1. Different people need different feautres. Only the flexibility of the software you are talking about can solve this problem.

2. Allow users to adjust the behaviour of the software, but do not make the choose from menus. Menus are for things changing often. Important things like indentation or colours used by the syntax highlighting engine are chagned very rarely so they should be "hidden" somehow.

3. Fast in terms of typing. I'm sure some of you have tried Vim and use it's hjkl to decrease the pain after 8 hours of editing.

4. Fast in terms of performance. Has anyone seen anything as fast as perl?

5. And the last thing, probably the most important one: configuration and extension language: PHP.

At work I use Vim but my favourite editor is GNU Emacs -- the most flexible thing on Earth. I think, that flexibility is even more important than functionality -- you can always add functionality (either writing some code yourself or by adding some kind of plugin) if you think it's missing.

BTW: this is my first post here, nice to meet all of you guys.

[nirus]

I have a resoution to all of this. Might sound rediculous but here it goes:

How about 1 editor with about 3 different scopes:

Pounded with Options Version
Everything you ever wanted, including a calculator with yellow pokadots

Middle of the road
Very rich, but no yellow polkadoted calculator

Very light
Just the major syntax highlighting, html, php, css, java script.

If you only want a few things and you are to specific then get the pounded with options version, it would be nice if you could set the options durring the install and things would not be available if you did not check them.... this would be the advanced custom install. just an idea. That might be hell for software development companies though. Sounds like an expensive product.

-Brent


BY the way!!!!!!!!!!
I want an apache httpd.conf file editor.... a free one, I saw one that was about 50$. Not worth it to edit ONE FILE!