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Comment by nadams | Hacker News Reader

> Dropping a newbie into Eclipse or MonoDevelop makes them feel like they are walking around in a byzantine museum

I tried really hard to use and like free/open source IDEs like Eclipse, Aptana, and Netbeans. They all felt clunky, didn't work, or worse took away features in later versions. I finally forked out the money for PHPStorm, PyCharm, and IntelliJ and it's been the best money I've ever spent. Trying to learn the internals of indefero using vi was a challenge (with file_put_contents as a debugging mechanism...) - but once I figured out how to use xdebug in PHPStorm it's just been amazing. It has the feel of Visual Studio without the extra bloat.

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Haha. You began listing off the IDEs, and I was going to post suggesting the IntelliJ line. There are still some clunky annoyances and bloat in the software, but overall it is the best line of editors I have ever used.

You say you've forked out money for both PHPStorm/PyCharm and the expensive IntelliJ. I thought IntelliJ automatically supports all the language addons, so why separate copies of the language-specific bundles? Am I wrong about IntelliJ, or did you just happen to buy that one last?

Well I have a mix of their free licenses (for open source projects) and paid licenses. I did pay for PyCharm and PHPStorm (and upgrades). Needless to say I do use commercial versions of all of them on an almost daily basis and I couldn't use anything else.

I could be wrong - but the way I understand IntelliJ language plugins is just really code autocomplete/syntax highlighting. PyCharm and PHPstorm have strong integration with the languages (debugging, inspectors, etc).

As an aside - for an individual license for IntelliJ $200 isn't a lot. Totally not rubbing it in but I've spent thousands of dollars on Visual Studio subscriptions (and I think they gave me a lifetime subscription of $50/month to Azure...). Check out bizspark - I definitely recommend it. Microsoft even waived the graduation fee for me.

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