I have tried other IDE’s off and on for the past 5 years – trying to get more of a Visual Studio experience. I was really jealous of the code-completion and hinting features that were available in VS. Dreamweaver does ok at basic function hints for PHP, but nothing I found did a great job of combining all the site management features of Dreamweaver with the intelligent code parsing (ie. reading my classes and adding them to the code-completion hints). I’ve tried Eclipse with its PHP plug-in, UltraEdit, Zend Studio, phpDesigner and probably some others that I’m not listing.

I can’t remember exactly when I first downloaded NuSphere PhpED for the first time; but recently I thought I’d give it yet another shot. Man, was I surprised! I’m using version 5.2 and it is awesome. It is the first time that I have what I consider to be a truly fully integrated development environment. It has projects (who doesn’t), an SSH client, SFTP/FTP, intelligent code completion based on my classes, an excellent code navigator which details class methods & variables, an integrated debugger with its own WAMP stack, server-side debugging (optional) and more!

I can already tell after using it for a week that its going to save me a ton of time and help me write better code.

Here are my top 5 features that I really love (in no particular order)…

1. Code Snippets: just type something like “func” and hit Ctrl+J to insert a full function block. You can add whatever snippets you want and even choose where to place the cursor when it is inserted (crucial time saver and major annoyance avoider).
2. Code/Variable completion: when you start typing a object it will provide you with all the available class methods along with their parameters. It will auto-complete variable names with respect to the document scope, based on your cursor position. In other words, if you’re working inside function it will know to only show you variables that were declared in that function or class-wide vars.
3. Internal Debugger: you can step through your code and instantly see where there are problems without having to do the save, upload, open browser, check for error dance.
4. Extremely customizable: I was quickly able to modify the keyboard shortcuts to what I was used to using in Dreamweaver.
5. Integrated SSH client: I love PuTTY just as much as the next person, but how cool is it that you can have a shell open in a tab right next to the document you’re working on.

The only downside is that NuSphere PhpED is not F/OSS. I paid $199 for the professional version; but really – that isn’t bad compared to Dreamweaver – and it’s proving to be an awesome tool for my purposes.

What are you using?