Confessions of a cat

Here’s why:

So you’ve been developing for a while. Coding PHP, etc. You must have a favorite IDE (code editor)…

My favorite is / was TextMate. I just loved one its fastness and mainly its ’sunburst’ dark background based color theme. The only thing I did not love with TextMate is its lack of automatic code completion / suggestion. It has none of that - and my feeling is that in such times of huge frameworks (yii, kohana, symfony, zend comes to mind) you can just always try to look up something. Once you’ve tried automatic code completion and suggestion (with docs automatically lifted from code) you can’t go back.

Add to this the open-source nature of Netbeans, and its support for CVS, SVN, PHP, Ruby, Python - this is just my list of required languages because I love ruby on rails, and the django framework, besides php of course -. Its support for code-snippets, auto-completion, debug (via xdebug for PHP). Also let’s not forget that this is an IDE written in Java, and it supports Java as a programming language as well (with GUI designer, debugging and so on). It also has a project navigator and a code navigator as well (class methods, attributes, etc.). It also quickly indexes your source code tree, so you can easily look up code - without even lifting your hand off the keyboard. It is just amazing.

And despite it’s being java - it’s speed is good. Well compared to TextMate it’s slow, but it does so many more things…

My only problem with it so far is the built-in default color profile ‘netbeans’ - › Continue reading