Best PHP Editor?
 

Hello all, I'm starting out in PHP, and I'm wondering if there is a really good PHP editor out there that's either free or really cheap. Any suggestions?

i've used vim, Dreamweaver MX, and JEdit...

honestly, i prefer JEdit, as it highlight/colors things intelligently, and has an FTP plugin that allows you to read/write directly from/to an FTP/SFTP server... and it has a lot of other plugins for miscellaneous other cool things... :)

Not made just for PHP, but I like Editplus. It will do syntax highlighting for PHP, Java, JSP, really anything, you can modify it for language. It's a free trial download and I think it's only 30 bucks to buy. I've used it mostly for Java, it's great for quick and dirty stuff. Also there is a spell checker plug in, that helps!

Along a similar vein, I use TextPad. I downloaded a syntax file for it, and everything is good. Not too fancy, but works damn well.

UltraEdit's my editor of choice.

granted, I don't code much PHP ... but the bf does, and he loves it too :)

Nice, I'm gonna hafta try this out now. I love the ability to ftp it right off the site and into the editor but I dislike you can't do that for other languages with dreamweaver.

I use ConTEXT mainly as it supports pretty much ever language but have TextPad installed as well. I didn't like Dreamweaver at all, i just didn't get how it worked. It looked as if i'd just be typing out the code myself so i just did that in a normal text editor.
Don't forget about NotePad though. Handy little tool.

I use UltraEdit for everything. The latest version is kinda glitchy though. It can't seem to indent closing curly brackets correctly, which is a pain.

Ok cool, thanks--I use Textpad right now, but I was thinking there might be a really well integrated editor that would be specifically designed with PHP in mind...I've heard of ultraedit and before and the others, so I'll go ahead and give them a go....However, I do got another question--how about a great HTML/website editor/creator? One I've seen recommended much is the Dreamweaver and Homesite ones....or is a text editor, such as textpad, really the best way to go on those?

I second EditPlus. :thumbsup:

Homesite is nothing more than a glorified text editor (it does a good job, though). I still use TextPad to do websites, too :)

I'd have to say I really like GVim 6.3. It is very widely used for many types of coding, does syntax highlighting, and is very customizable. Best of all, it's free. I use Dreamweaver sometimes for fast FTP'ing, but I use GVim when I am about to do a lot of code without checking it for a while.

Herk

Zend is good if you like bells and whistles. I actually bought it for my development team and was very happy. The remote step debugging is good.

ultra edit for quick touchups. i love the open from ftp and save to ftp functions, html tidy is sweet, and with the launchy extension you can view webpage source in it as well. I use kate under linux for similar types of things.

eclipse with the php plugin for big projects. i like eclipse because i can use one environment for php, perl, java, c, c++, plus there is a good regular expression evaluator and a very nice database interface plugin.

i've never used editplus, but i'm a fan of Crimson Editor,

http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

keyword highlighting, tabed files, so all the files you're working on are contained in the same application, etc.......

I'm a Cooledit man, personally. It's minimal enough to stay out of my way, can open multiple files at once, and has good syntax highlighting.

I just wanted to say thanks for all of the suggestions here. I'd just been using a dorky text editor for years and forgot how nice syntax highlighting was until I got back into C#. *sigh*

I Like SciTE
 

SciTE is a editor for many different languages but it also includes PHP.

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

Emacs for when I'm using SSH, which is pretty much the only way I currently work on my website. But for working on my own computer, Editplus.

Im a big fan of Homesite, yes its a glorified text editor, but it has a lot of features that make coding easier. I use it for ASP, but it can be used for PHP as well. The built in FTP client makes your life so much easier once you get used to it.

Im fond of HTML-Kit.

I am playing with TruStudio.

I like Komodo for PHP editing because of all the debugging features it offers and the fact that I can usually run bits of code in the editor itself to test things out.

I use to use UltaEdit in the past but then I found Zend and never looked back.

Syn

Syntax-Hilighting for any number of languages (with user-defined hilighting as well)... Tabbed Editing, Scriptable, etc Absolutely free and open-source.

On a Mac, BBEdit is hard to beat.

PrimalScript

Dreamweaver MX is my program of choice. Once you really learn how to use it the power and functionality of it is amazing

Notepad2
Its small and has highlight features.

At home I use Ultraedit for all my programming stuff, unless it's Windows programming in C++ or something... then I use Visual Studio.

At work I use vim, because I'm not paid to be productive, I'm paid to show up for 4 hours a day :) Yay for internships, where students aren't expected to do work quickly :) Vim will do syntax highlighting, it's just that... the learning curve is really, really steep, to say the least.

VIM!! Yes it's the learning curve is a little steep, but once you figure it out you can get around really fast. And it's universal--pretty much all Unix variants have had it for about forever, and there is a really nice Windows version too.

Newer versions do PHP indenting/syntax highlighting out of the box, but there's an improved indent plugin that works even better at http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1120

If you are doing any more than simple scripting, the debugging section of PHPEd can come in pretty useful. you can monitor variables as they initialise and step through.

I think you have to pay for it though: http://www.nusphere.com/

I'm still fond of good old var_dump for that purpose, but hey...