My post on my love with Java has sparked a mild IDE war in the comments section. So I thought of sharing my thoughts on using an IDE.
I have used just simple text editors like vi, notepad, textpad to full grown IDE’s like Zend, IntelliJ IDEA etc. (Well I know that some of you are going to accuse me for calling vi has just a simple text editor 😉 ) and my answer to the question, “Whether you need an IDE?” is surely YES. I have worked under people who think that using an IDE is overkill and distracting but personally my view is that if you are going to do the same task more than twice a day then your IDE should do it. But at the same time I do respect people’s view that an IDE should be simple to use and not bloated and too heavy on the machine. After all you are going to spend most of your time with it and if it’s too slow then you productivity is under danger.
When ever I get a chance to meet a person working as a web developer one of my first questions to them would be, “What IDE are you using?” and believe it or not it is worse than the question “Which religion do you follow?” and have fought/witnessed soo many IDE wars. 😉
So if you ask me what my favorite is, For Java I mainly use IntelliJ IDEA and I simply love its refactoring, debugging and navigation support. I can go to any method/class/file with just a few keystrokes. I also love its code folding and its support for Javascript and CSS.
But for PHP I should rather admit that I am still in the search of a one with all the features I need. I use Zend mostly and love its debugging and syntax support but miss code folding (For HTML) and support for Javascript and CSS.
Recently I came across Aptana and it looks really promising. It has built-in support for both Javascript and HTML/CSS. If they could add support for PHP (which they say is coming soon) I am sold.
So guys, tell me “What IDE you use?” and what is your favorite feature?