Best all around free IDE for mac | Hacker News Reader

Best all around free IDE for mac

2 pointsisurfbecause9 comments

What would be a good free ide for jquery, javascript, and php?

You're opening up a whole can of words with this question! Everyone has their favorite IDE when it comes to PHP. An example of this is an excellent forum discussion about your different options: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/116292/what-is-the-best-i...

If you're interested in free software, you're pretty much limited to something that is eclipse-based. I've tried most of the major ones, including Komodo, Zend Studio (not free), Aptana Studio, etc. There's also NetBeans (not eclipse-based), if you have experience working with NetBeans for Java development.

Learning any IDE is a big investment in time and you'll get a zillion different responses because a choosing a good IDE for you depends on your goals. If you're just learning PHP for the first time, and goal is to have an integrated debugger (helps you find mistakes in your code), then I really suggest the Zend Studio IDE along with Zend Server to host your applications. Zend Server is similar to XAMPP. Working with those two together will allow you to more easily trace code, debug, etc. Zend Studio isn't free, but you could find a version out there somewhere or get an unused copy from a friend. Negative: not a lot of tutorials or info out there about setting it up, but a while ago I managed to do it without many problems.

Otherwise I would suggest Aptana: http://www.aptana.com/ It's free and there is considerable support if you search Google for answers to your challenges/questions.

Good Luck! Maby let us know if you're just getting started learning PHP, or if you have experience with another language/IDE - that would help everyone figure out what the best option for you might be.

Thanks bro, u guys are tight. Let's see, I am a coldfusion developer and use dreamweaver at work but on PC. I've also done some flex apps using flashbuilder which is eclipse. I guess I could use dreamweaver or eclipse for mac.... I googled mac ide reviews, but i'm still on the fence. I'm sure i could find an unused copy of zend studio. I was just wondering what does industry use, if I wanted to switch over to be a php developer. I was hoping to get a majority vote on an IDE but ur right, it is opening a can of worms.

I suggest http://emacsformacosx.com/ .

I <3 emacs, but there's not really a reasonable PHP mode for it that handles interspersed HTML well.

Have you tried nXhtml? If so, what do you consider unreasonable about it? It works well for me.

I used it for a while. Indentation would always break in really awkward ways.

wow i was watching a youtube vid on it, intense. Talk about a learning curve haha http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1dKFpGwKZ4

I love Espresso and Coda, in that order.

Cool I haven't heard of Espresso. I'll research more on that

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