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’ - it is the standard white background one, and if you have spent any longer period of time in front of computers you know that staring at white makes your eyes bleed after quite a short while. At least it does for me, and if you google ‘dark color profile’ for and ide you know that it does for others too.

There’s the ruby extra color themes plugin - which is nice but it only works well with ruby / rails projects.

So I’ve decided to create my own small tweaks, and offer it to you as well. This is nothing big, just a little bit easier on the eyes.

You can download it from here:

netbeans67-php-colors-and-settings

Usage: start up netbeans (version 6.7 or later) choose preferences, hit import at the bottom of the panel, and choose the downloaded zip file. It will pop up with options found in the zip file. Tick ‘Fonts & Colors’. That’s it. There’s also general PHP settings stored in it, but it’s only useful if you use xampp on OSX as it has the xampp php interpreter set (and the PHPUnit testing framework as well, but change the home dir of it if you need).

I know it’s a bit grey but it was the easiest to do and still looking good.