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Comment by blinky1456 | Hacker News Reader

Any PHP devs here? what IDEs are you using currently. Is netbeans considered crummy for modern development?

People keep making offhand comments about it lately, and i wondered if there is a much better(and free) alternative I am overlooking.

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PHPStorm is what I use and hear a lot of. After Zend Studio switched over to Eclipse, I moved to Sublime Text, then PHPStorm/JetBrains

I haven't heard of people using Netbeans for PHP in ages. I don't know if PHPStorm still has their Early Access program, but it basically gave you a free 30 day build of their beta version. Within 30 days there was a new build and the ticker started over again.

I use NetBeans for PHP development for last 10 years, and never regretted it. It has plenty of features that save my time when it comes to code navigation, also since circa 2012 Java got considerably faster on Linux, so almost no lag is perceived. It's great news that Apache finally added PHP support back to it because I'm still on 8.2. As for other IDEs, sometimes I use Kate with Projects plugin (it allows to grep all filenames that are in version control) for quick edits. All KFramework-based tools feel much faster than Gnome or Java-based ones, but Kate has a set of show-stopper "not-a-bug" issues (like shitty tab handling) which make it inusable for uninterrupted, productive work.

P.S. Can't say much about Apache, but when I submitted a ticket to old NetBeans about high CPU usage in some version-control-related scenarios - that was back in 2013 - the ticket was closed and issue was fixed less than in a week. I never expected such agility from projects of this scale.

IntelliJ ultimate with php plugin, it’s basically phpstorm but I also use the python and some others.

A single unified IDE for everything makes sense to me.

Took this route after using PhpStorm for a year or 2 as sometimes I do ruby and will likely work on Python and Go as well. And after 2 years, you only pay $7 a month instead of $4 with PhpStorm, which is nothing.

It's especially good if a project contains multiple languages, like core written in Go and scripts written in Python.

But I do keep Android Studio as that's what Google targets as development IDE and Googleability helps by using the same app.

Pretty much the same as me, I'm full stack so the backend is either PHP or Java, the deploy scripts are ansible (so python/yaml, dev virtualisation is vagrant so ruby and frontend is ts/html, Intellij has first class support for all of those.

I used to use Netbeans for PHP dev and loved it but development of the IDE seemed to slow down and the transition to the Apache foundation took too long. I have since gotten very familiar to using VS Code with the PHP intelliSense addon. VS Code is very fast and light on resources and has an addon for almost everything.

I use PHPStorm these days. It's quite good. Long ago I was a Netbeans user, but at some point I switched over and never really looked back.

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