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Best PHP editor for Mac?

I use Coda mainly. If you're at all involved in the design as well as the coding then it's awesome.

Occasionally I'll be in a pure code mood - in which case Coda is still great, but I'll often switch to TextMate for simplicity and, well, just for a change of scenery!
 
bryanpage said:
Occasionally I'll be in a pure code mood - in which case Coda is still great, but I'll often switch to TextMate for simplicity and, well, just for a change of scenery!
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That's funny I always feel the TextMate editor is more powerful than the SubEtha editor found in Coda.

For managing a site, Coda is best, for editing Text and non web languages, TextMate still wins for me.
 
Hmm... Dreamweaver isn't very popular it seems. I use DW CS3 and love the code highlighting, function name suggestion, and API lookup. DW isn't perfect and could do with a few modifications to become a better PHP coding application, but it is by far the best application I've worked with.
 
geoffreak said:
Hmm... Dreamweaver isn't very popular it seems. I use DW CS3 and love the code highlighting, function name suggestion, and API lookup. DW isn't perfect and could do with a few modifications to become a better PHP coding application, but it is by far the best application I've worked with.
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I second that, i have tried a lot of apps and dreamweaver works the best for me. i wish the code completion was more like how eclipse does for Java. other than that, I am very happy with dreamweaver
 
I havent found an IDE i really love. So i tend to use Textmate & Dreamweaver. DW for more html oriented work and TM for coding.In dreamweaver i can rightclick and get a list of functions. That's pretty nice. I miss taht i TM. Havent used BBEdit since 2000. Maby i should get that another try. That was the best option back then. The thing i miss most with TM is code completion. I Really miss that. CSS Edit is sooo awsome. I wish TM where the same for PHP.

Just my 2 eurocents
 
I tried Coda twice, but, personally found it lacking way too many features needed for coding. It's a great text editor, but, not a great code editor. For a good code editor, try BBEdit.
 
Started out with Zend Studio, felt it was too "heavy" for my uses, and switched to the simpler Textmate.

Upon finding Coda, I fell in love with it. Looking forward to Espresso now...
 
Vote for Coda

I would like to put in my vote for Coda. It's cheap, powerful, and great for designers working on small to medium size projects. Teams will need something more robust.
 
I've been coding PHP/MySQL/HTML/Javascript...blah blah for about 15 years now. The real important thing to remember is that true PHP coding professionals need the proper tools, along with support of all the other languages that you employ.

Using that logic, Dreamweaver becomes a very bad choice for PHP programmers. There is no real-time syntax checking, nor is there any kind og PHP bookmarks/breakpoints that can run in real time. There is no debugger either. However, it's pretty good for plain ol HTML/CSS stuff. It's quite overpriced compared to the high quality free options.

Coda is also way overpriced and lack quite a few important features in my opinion. No debugging, no real syntax checker until you actually save and then you get some light notifications. It is a decent text editor and allows splitting of screens. But it nowhere near justifies it's $100 price tag. Perhaps $40 or perhaps $50 would be more in line.

Smultron, which is free is outstanding, but it's limited in project control. It's also pretty much a text editor, but better than most. It's about the same as BBEdit.

I've also used Zend, which touts itself as the PHP leader, but it's editor can't even do word wrap. It, like Dreamweaver, is quite expensive for what you get.

There are actually two great solutions that are free, offer complete support for all web languages, have debugging and offer real-time syntax checking with database interfacing. NetBeans supports ALL languages including Java if you are so inclined. Their PHP support is excellent, along with almost anything else. The Aptana Studio version 1.5, if you can still find it, is also excellent. The newer Aptana Studio version 2 and above, only uses PDT and thus is a big step backwards.

Bottom line, try NetBeans (Netbeans.org) and I think you'll be VERY happy.
 
kkathman said:
Bottom line, try NetBeans (Netbeans.org) and I think you'll be VERY happy.
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My biggest issue with NetBeans is the massive amount of bloat and slowness that results. It does have many nice features, but when everything starts slowing down so much because of it productivity drops. I'll use it on occasion, but have to make sure I'm not running to many other applications and that I don't open too many files at once.
 
Out of curiosity I downloaded Aptana 2.0.

I couldn't even figure out how to open a file.

Back to Fraise (Smultron) for me.
 
I used Netbeans as my primary development platform, it's very fast and efficient for PHP, Java and Ruby.

Some of the niceties like it remembering the classes within the project save me a lot of time debugging spelling mistakes.
 
I would say that it depends on what kind of work you are doing. Text editors are fine for small sites, but if we're talking about major development, you really need a proper IDE which can take care of code and llbrary management and things like refactoring, in which case Zend studio is probably going to be the best.

I've been using Zend studio for several years now, and have found it pretty stable on the whole.

That said, I occasionally use Dreamweaver if I'm not on my main Mac, and that is not too bad for quick code edits. Dreamweaver is best used as an expensive text editor cos it's naff all use for anything else.
 
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