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what is your favorite IDE/editor for writing code?

hmm, tough question for me. i have (had actually) so many favorites depending on context. but definitely it’s interesting to write here about them

1. notepad – i am a notepad fan, for a very long time since 98 to 2006 and still i like it very much. but well, after that i’d found notepad++ and i liked it for it’s outstanding syntax highlighting features. if by any chance, i have to use windows these days, i work in notepad++

2. visual studio 6: yup, i must agree it is one of the best ide i’ve ever came in touch with. i have worked on visual basic for a long time (99 to 2006) and i was simply in love with visual studio ide. and it’s awesome intellisense + gui designer was the center of the attraction.

3. zend studio: i still use it. its one of my most favorite ide because of it’s os independent distribution. i like most of the features in it (SQL editor, subversion support, FTP etc) and ofcourse the feature to check the output of yourcode inside it. the object inspector is really a very cool feature. and i also use “find in files” feature very often to find the file i am particularly looking to edit. oh by the way – i use the old version (the non-eclipse version) and still use the 5.5.1 version for my everyday development.

4. phped: its a good editor for windows (never tried it’s linux version) but for some unknown reason i’ve failed to get used to with it.

5. netbeans: its superb 🙂 i like it very much. but as i am used to with zend studio i dont use it much. but i always suggest netbeans to someone who is looking for a decent and powerful ide for php (well, yeah also for java specially for the outstanding GUI designer for swing based apps)

6. aptana studio and spket ide : both of them are very very good for editing javascript. i use spket in linux for it’s small footprint. and aptana studio in my regular home and office machines.

6. nano – yeah it is the latest editor that i use almost everyday. you know it is available in both linux and mac. so i use it frequently in my local dev platform (mac osx based) and remote machines (linux based). and it is much more easier than vi – i know vi(m) is a very good editor and there are millions of user of vi(m), so what? if i can’t find it useful then i wont use it 🙂 – i find nano is very handy and easy to use. i have enabled php syntax highlighting in nano (via nanoarc) and it works really cool in shell 🙂

i dont like eclipse. there is no particular reason but for some unknown reason (i remember one, extremely resource hungriness and large footprint) i never feel comfortable with it. i use only one eclipse based ide (aptana) becoz there is no other good alternative to it. and only for this reason i also don’t use the new zend studio.

so hey, what is your favorite ide?

81 replies on “what is your favorite IDE/editor for writing code?”

My fav has been NuSphere PHPEd for the last 2 years (thanks to them for the free license they provided me). It is a superb IDE and speeds up the development a lot.

However, from last week i’ve started with NetBeans and I’m sticking with it – it’s a good one 😉

KDevelop4, of which the third beta was just released. While still a touch on the crashy side with the PHP support, it is, for want of a better word, awesome 🙂 And since the debugger framework is being written by one of the people behind the PHP support in KDevelop4, well, you can guess what that means for the debugger 😉

I like eclipse, because of the good subversion and bugzilla integration. I also like that I can use it on Linux and Windows and it has very good support for Linux / Fedora development and supports lots of languages.

It can be a bit of a memory and CPU hog though, but I found this more of a problem on Windows then on Linux.

The years i used Windows it was:

Editplus for simple Editing
PHPEclipse and later Eclipse with PDT as IDE

On Linux (Ubuntu) at the beginning:
Gedit as Editor
Eclipse with PDT as IDE
and Eclipse got replaced by Netbeans sme time ago

On Windows I use Notepad++ for quick editing. Eclipse PDT (because it’s free) for advanced PHP editing. I went back and forth between Netbeans, but I am missing some features which made me go back to Eclipse. For languages such as C, C++ and C# I use Visual Studio of course.

On Linux I use Vim with a bunch of plugins. Works OK in most cases (and for most languages) but now and then I fall back to Eclipse PDT too.

I find the best cocktail of editors for me is Coda by panicware (www.panic.com) with a large helping of vim. Coda provides enough niceties while maintaining its performance level, vim lets me gets in and work the test and debug cycle really quick.

I find that jEdit covers my needs pretty well for PHP, Perl, JavaScript, CSS & HTML. I use Idle for Python, because of its handling of indentation, code hinting and quick access to a running shell to test with.

I have tried Eclipse with PDT a couple times on my Mac but couldn’t keep it running. I will admit to liking Notepad++ for Windows. I just don’t usually do any coding in Windows.

Vim for most things Linux although not so much in Windows as I find gVim clunky and Cygwin isn’t really that useful for me. I do use Netbeans for Java-based development, but for anything else I find it’s a real memory hog – probably because I don’t do enough Java development and therefore don’t notice it 😉

NuSphere PHPeD for all things php-related
Apatana Studio for javascript, (X)HTML and CSS
Visual Studio for .Net stuff (though I try not to have to do any if I can get away with it)

I’ve tried both Net Beans and Zend Studio, but both of them were extremely slow for me.

well, to me IDE is like a sharp sword, this can cut off anything i want, but if i can’t control, it can cut off my head too because of my wrong use.

i have been using IntelliJ IDEA for last 5 years, i can cut off anything through this cutting edge IDE. i was used to write java code using it, later wrote PHP and Ruby code using this cutting edge IDE.

love it and respect it..
my advice to all, try to stick with one IDE, dont switch IDE unless that sux, learning thousands of IDE is not at all a creditable thing to talk 🙂

best wishes,

On Mac OS:
TextMate (for everyday all-purpose stuff)
Zend Studio (5.x) (for larger PHP-projects)
BBedit (like TextMate but I like the really cool diff-funcionality)
jEdit (if TextMate and BBedit fail…)

I’m still a big fan of Zend Studio 5.5.1. I’ve upgraded the license to the Eclipse version but I can’t get used to it. It almost never responds with the autocompletion as 5.5.1 does (saves me half of the work on code) and it doesn’t have line wrapping which I use regularly. The ftp and svn integration in 5.5.1 is usable but not very good. Svn in Eclipse is just perfect but (s)ftp support through that Remote Systems thing is just awful.

For PHP: ZendStudio 5.5. The eclipse version is crap, netbeans was nice, but didn’t want to code hint my static methods without holding down a key-combo which was annoying. Also netbeans didn’t have a good remote server option just to get into a few files and create a project for them like ZS 5 has.

I also use pico/nano for remote server config changes.

I tried Aptana, but hate eclipse.

Good post.

NetBeans is superb, but as it is said – i really dont like to hit some keys to get the auto suggestions for the completion of functions. 🙂 –

EditPlus still briliant after all these years

keep trying all of the others listed here but they all have one or ten things that drive me nuts !
Hate the fact that Zend is java – slow and crap as ever other java program ever in the name of compatability

I use a whole slew, no real stand-out favorites I guess. Depends on the language I’m working with or whatever catches my fancy. Ordered roughly by how often I use them:

Linux (my main system):
vim (mostly command line, occasionally gvim, frequently cmd line via ssh)
Eclipse / Aptana
kate
jEdit
komodo edit (I haven’t tried their full IDE yet)
NetBeans
KDevelop 4

Windows (when I have to):
Dreamweaver
vim
Visual Studio 2008
Editpad Pro
phpDesigner

It’s clear, I go for KISS:

1. My own Apache-PHP-MySQL stack
2. Dreamweaver
3. Ultra Edit
4. Firefox + Web Developer Toolbar + Firebug
5. MSIE + Opera + Chrome + Safari + etc
6. My brain and hands.

… all on top of plain Windows XP. Yes, that’s right, XP, I’m not crazy at all… it works great with a little bit of tweaking and tunning…

on Windows
– jEdit
– Komodo Edit
– NetBeans for PHP
– Vim

on Linux
– jEdit
– Komodo Edit
-Vim
– kate (not recently)

Of lately I am very impressed by Komodo Edit. I removed NetBeans because too much bloat.

don’t understand why you don’t like eclipse pdt? its my favorite! the new eclipse 3.5 an the pdt 2.1 with xdebug is amazing, its fast, easy to use and very powerfull

I, also, am a fan of eclipse’s php offering. I really like the fact that I can write code, and not have to rely on my own eyes or the server to check for syntax. Also, the Alt-Click to go to a function definition is invaluable, and worth any other inconveniences.

I love notepad++. I don’t have a mac and thus not able to use textmate. According to me its a must for any developer. I hope someday I will work with textmate. That will be a dream come true. To survive till then, I have found a step-brother of textmate on windows. It almost copied almost every textmate feature. Its called “e” text editor. check it out at http://www.e-texteditor.com/ . I am using a cracked copy of it(the cracked one has some problems, bundle modules not get initialized properly). But I am planning to buy a licensed copy later this year.

i use netbeans for php, c++, html/css, javascript. And i have tried aptana and i thought netbeans is better for javascript it have some bugs but I feel comfortable with netbeans javascript ..

thanks everyone for your valuable opinions

@Nasim – yes i know Aptana is eclipse and I’ve mentioned why I’m forced to use that. There is no good alternative of Aptana, its superb.

But yeah, these days I am trying to use Netbeans for that. Eclipse is really too much for me 🙂

আমি Notepad++, Zend Studio, ar Visual Studio 6 ব্যবহার করেছি… বাকীগুলো ব্যবহার করার মত এক্সপার্টাইস এখনো হয় নাই 😛

আর টুকিটাকি কাজের জন্য মাইক্রোসফট এক্সপ্রেশন ওয়েব মজাদার 🙂

Used to be jEdit however that was buggy and memory hungry, even though I do have 4Gig, I have now found Notepad++ on sourceforge to be a better editor.

> don’t understand why you don’t like eclipse pdt?

I never did like that either, way too complex just to get your PHP together… besides of which, have you seen the footprint of that beast?

Likewise with the tools you get from Zend, way too much bloated (feature creep comes to mind), slow on less powerful PCs and in some cases, buggy.

We are busy people and we need something fast, flexible and reliable, something simple usually does it.

1. NOTEPAD++ on windows
2. NOTEPAD++ on linux (wine)
3. Blumentals webuilder
4. Visual Studio + PHP.NET plugin
5. Macromedia Dreamweaver
6. Adobe Dreamweaver

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