I have been doing a bunch php development recently and I am over notepad++.

I have tried Eclipse with the PHP view, and it is good but I am yet to find a ftp plugin for it that works as well as the ftp plugin for notepad++.

What would people recommend. The freer the better.

Cheers.

Tried Crimson Editor?

http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

http://www.textpad.com/

I use this and filezilla... I always think it's a bad idea saving direct to FTP...

http://www.zend.com/products/studio/ is another pro one; I used it for a while and thought it was good, although it ran a bit like shit (I assume because it is written in Java, but in deference to all the Java fanboys I'll offer another option: maybe it just sucks). It might be better now on more modern hardware.

It is expensive (~$300) though, and I suspect bang for buck is probably better with PHPStorm.

I haven't used any other OSS options except for Eclipse, which I never really got into but I thought it looked pretty awesome.

If you need the FTP plugin to deploy to production, I would recommend stopping doing that and switching over to SVN or some other source control, but if you must use FTP then I would just write a PHP script to automate your FTP deploys which you can probably hook into Eclipse yourself without much hassle.

PornoPete, I know exactly how you feel, I'm right with you.

I've tried Eclipse, and Netbeans, and they fail to do the trick.

I use a program called "EditPlus" which is basically another Notepad++ clone, it crashes all the time if you don't know how to be gentle with it, and it incorrectly highlights syntax, it is maintained by like one middle aged fat north korean guy, but I use it religiously because of one reason: FTP. It lets you open and save files via an SSH compatible FTP browser, just like they were on your own computer. WHAT AN OBVIOUS FEATURE... yet... No other fucking program in the history of Earth has this feature... why the fuck not. I've seen some half-arsed plugins for eclipse that claim to give access to remote files, but they are shit and actually make you save the files locally and then 'upload' them periodically... no no no.

Pinky, I have accepted your advice, and I gotta say: so far so good!
It's like a suped up slick version of editplus, and has the feature I need...!


edit: except uh... why can't I drag and drop files onto the program to open them...
I am so disappointed by this. WHAT AN OBVIOUS FEATURE to leave out.. insert comment about history of earth here.

last edited by thermite at 13:33:14 16/Jan/12

Got drag and drop working now without doing anything, must have been a fluke or something before, ultraedit pwns. It does what I want, comes with some pretty useful features, and yet doesn't have the bloat and pretentious wank factor of an IDE.

Considering paying for it. (the audience goes *oooh*)

Yep, UltraEdit is a great little app. Especially some of the buttons at the bottom that do HTML decode/encode and menu items like 'capitalise' and so on - you just keep on finding new little tricks.

i can't take the credit for this, shared post with step son who's a programmer. made me lol though