Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned developer, PHPStorm is the best tool for developing secure and maintainable applications.
If you’re on the market for a new PHP IDE — perhaps because you feel limited with options in the free version of PHPStorm — you’ve come to the right place. In this article, I’ll show you how to choose between the different editions of PHPStorm based on your professional needs.
Atom
Atom is an up to date text editor built by GitHub folks and accessible free of cost underneath MIT license. Atom has an ecosystem of its own with the vast community at the back of it and tons of plugins and packages on hand to expand its functionality.Atom is truly flexible which means you can turn Atom into your required PHP online editor since it is scalable and extremely customizable. In addition, it is an accurate cross-platform alternative with support for Windows, Red Hat Linux, OS X, Debian Linux and Fedora 22+.How to twirl Atom into PHP IDE Free?When it comes to PHP, there are numerous packages presented that convert Atom editor into an entirely loaded IDE for PHP which is not only free of cost but very effective than many other commercial PHP IDEs.The packages you call for to turn atom editor into a totally functional free PHP IDE comprise php-cs-fixer, hyperclick-php, php-integrator-base, linter-php and atom-autocomplete-php.
- Supported operating systems: Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD
- License: MIT License
- Source code: https://github.com/atom/atom
- Supported languages: PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, C, C#, Objective C, Perl, Python, Ruby, Go, XML, and more
Atom is the “hackable text editor for the 21st century”, according to its slogan. Originally, it was GitHub’s internal tool that later they made open source, but the project is still maintained by GitHub. It’s called hackable because you can customize every single aspect of the editor interface, such as the UI and syntax theme, key bindings, formatting, global and language-specific settings, and more.
In addition to the functionality of the core editor, you can download almost 9,000 packages that allow you to add basically any feature you need. To configure Atom as a PHP editor, you can add PHP-specific packages for debugging, refactoring, annotations, linting, and other development-related tasks.
Best features:
- customizable UI with 3,000+ open source Atom themes
- syntax highlighting and smart autocompletion
- file system browsing and multiple panes
- advanced find and replace tool
- integrated package manager (called apm)
- easy-to-access command palette
- extensibility
- real-time code collaboration (with the in-house-built Teletype package)
- direct Git and GitHub integration (with the in-house-built GitHub package)
Komodo
It is Developed by ActiveState in the year 2000, Komodo IDE is one of the best PHP MySQL development and functional tools. Most of the functionality of Komodo is innate from the Python interpreter.It utilizes Mozilla and Scintilla as its foundation for the reason that they share much functionality, features and support the alike languages. Due to its numerous extensions and pipe feature, Komodo has turned to be an enormous success.Features:-
Provision of Split View and Multi-Window
Swift Bookmarking
Smart Language Detection
Document Object Model Viewer
Sustain for Git and Remote File Access
Bluefish
Bluefish
- Supported operating systems: Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris
- License: GNU GPL vs 3
- Source code:https://sourceforge.net/p/bluefish/code/HEAD/tree/
- Supported languages: HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, C, C++, and more
Bluefish is an advanced source code editor that supports many programming languages. You can use it on different operating systems, but it also comes with a Gnome integration, so if you are on the look for a PHP editor for your Linux distro, Bluefish can be a great choice for you — its GUI is also consistent with the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines, so it even looks good on a Gnome desktop.
As Bluefish was created with web developers in mind, it comes with useful features such as Emmet (formerly Zen Coding) support, dialogs and wizards for HTML tags, Unicode character browser, and many others. It also has an intuitive user interface and is easy to use, so you can safely choose it if you are a beginner or don’t want to put a lot of time into learning how to use a PHP editor.
Best features:
- lightweight, loads fast
- multiple document interface (tested with 1000+ opened documents)
- full-screen editing and split view
- editing functionality such as auto-completion, inline reference information, powerful and replace, snippets sidebar, and more
- remote file access via FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and other protocols
- supports multiple encodings (default is UTF8)
- extensible via plugins
Aptana Studio
The Aptana Studio built by Aptana Inc. in the year 2014 is one of the finest open source PHP development tool. It is simple to download from the web and accessible to all at free of cost. It is obtainable as a standalone on Windows, Mac and Linux OS.Features:-
Comes with Syntax Error Annotations
Has built-in PHP Server
Supports DOM and CSS
Code Formatting and Auto Indexing
Supports PHP Debugger
Cloud 9
Cloud9 comes pre-packaged with necessary tools for all the rage programming languages, together with JavaScript, Python, and PHP, so you don’t require installing files for your development machine to commence new projects. In view of the fact that your Cloud9 IDE is cloud-based, you can execute your projects from your home or office or anywhere utilizing an internet-connected machine.The platform offers a flawless experience for developing serverless applications empowering you to straightforwardly define resources, debug, and switch amid local and remote execution of serverless applications. With Cloud9, you can swiftly share your development environment with your team, facilitating you to pair program and monitor every other’s inputs on a real-time basis.Features:-
Code just with a browser
Code mutually in real time
Build serverless applications with effortlessness
Initiate novel projects swiftly
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Vim
Vim
- Supported operating systems: Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS
- License: Vim License
- Source code: https://github.com/vim/vim
- Supported languages: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Lua, JavaScript, Perl, C, C++, and many others
Vim stands for Vi Improved as it’s the improved version of the Vi code editor created for Unix systems. It adds several important features to Vi, such as comparing and merging files, syntax highlighting, search history, spell checking, split view, support for protocols such as HTTP, FTP, and SSH, and many others.
You can use Vim in six basic modes, respectively normal, visual, select, insert, command line, and ex (exit) modes — see this article by FreeCodeCamp for the main differences between Vim modes. Vim has a text user interface that you can manage using commands and key mappings. However, if you’d rather use Vim with a graphical user interface, you can download its Gvim (Graphical Vim) version as well.
Similar to Emacs, Vim is highly customizable and extensible and supports hundreds of programming languages. There are thousands of Vim plugins available, but you can also use Vim Script (also called VimL), Vim’s internal scripting language, or another scripting language to add extra functionality.
Vim is a very robust tool, but if you are a beginner or code only occasionally, it’s probably not the best choice for you because of its steep learning curve. However, if you want flexibility and custom functionality and don’t mind learning, Vim can be the ideal PHP editor for you. If you want to go that route, here’s a great tutorial by The Valuable Dev blog about how to configure Vim as a PHP editor.
Best features:
- 6 different editing modes
- easy mode for beginners
- Unicode and multi-language support
- editing functionality such as advanced search and replace, multi-level undo tree, split view, code completion, and more
- extensive plugin system
- built-in manual
RJ TextEd
RJ TextEd
- Supported operating systems: Windows
- License: freeware but accepts donations (no particular license is specified)
- Source code: not released
- Supported languages: HTML, CSS, Sass, LESS, Markdown, JavaScript, JSON, PHP, ASP, Java, Perl, and more
RJ TextEd is a one-person project by Rickard Johansson (RJ) — and a really impressive one. It’s a full-featured source code editor for Windows operating systems, created specifically for web development. Even though RJ TextEd’s website looks a bit basic, this is a text editor with many interesting features under the hood.
You can change every aspect of the UI by choosing and customizing a theme, open multiple document views at the same time in different arrangements, and use developer-friendly tools such as a color picker, an HTML validation and repair tool, charmaps, text-to-HTML conversion, and many others. RJ TextEd also has an embedded browser preview (Chrome and Internet Explorer) for HTML files.
The licensing of RJ TextEd is a bit unusual. Although it’s freeware software, it’s not open source, as the author doesn’t want to release the source code. However, you can still extend the functionality by creating an extension. If you have any questions to ask, RJ TextEd has an active user forum too.
Best features:
- HTML and CSS wizards
- browser preview for HTML files
- theme manager with pre-designed themes
- built-in project manager
- regular expression creator
- macro manager
- FTP/STFP client with syncing
- editing functionality such as side-by-side file comparison, advanced sorting, code folding, auto-completion, and more
Conclusion
PhpStorm is the best php editor that is also an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Aptana web studio is another good editor. There are so many great php editors out there, but these are my top choices based on their features. I’ve tried both of these editors and have my own preferences, so its worth giving them a try to see which one you prefer most.