2008: The year of simplicity? (at least for a PHP editor)

Every web programmer usually been through this before. We learnt our first programming language and created our first 'hello world' application via Windows' Notepad. Some of us used more 'advanced' editors like Microsoft Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, which were touting their WYSIWYG capabilities, making it easier to create web pages (although, some of us were stuck with vi and some others, which were learning ASP.NET, were stuck with Visual Studio).

But, as our skill increased and the projects grew from simple static pages to the more dynamic page contents, OOP and its properties (instance, components, etc.), enterprise-class frameworks, and new technologies like AJAX. We required syntax highlighting then, since looking up codes without it was like looking at a jungle trying to find a single specific tree. Then we required auto-complete, making the days remembering all the variable/function/class names to be numbered. Hundreds even thousands line of codes make debugging a big deal in web programming since basic editors for the languages didn't have that capability (excluding Visual Studio of course). Eventually editors with this capability popped out, making what's been available to desktop programming for a while to be available to web programming also.

Final quarter of 2006 and the year 2007 saw me trying out some of the advanced editors for my choice of programming language: PHP, Notepad and Dreamweaver just didn't cut it anymore. After scouring the web, several applications came to light, one of them being Zend Studio (back then it was still called Zend Desktop Environment/ZDE).

I used Zend Studio for a while since it got all the basic prequisites of an advanced editor plus it was created by the same company that produced PHP in the first place. The setback was that it was slow (at that time). It was built upon Java and being in beta state (it was leaking memory) didn't help either (not the mention that I always have this tingling feeling when using a Java app in Windows..).

After that I tried a series of editors: Eclipse (with PHP plugin), PHPEdit, PHPEd, even back to Zend Studio again. Eclipse was feature-rich with an extensible plugins system, PHPEdit and PHPEd had working debuggers, and recent iterations of Zend Studio were finally not prone to crashes like their predecessor was.

But trying all these editors sometimes made me deviate from my main purpose: to get my job done. I spent a lot of times trying out various features of the editors, even the ones that I didn't really need. The bad news was trying out all the features of each editor made me want them all, which was a problem since no editor has them all. One had this feature that the others didn't and vice versa.

At the end of 2007, I finally decided what features that I need in an editor. In the end I only needed two (and one optional feature). It had to have syntax highlighting for at least all of web programming language (HTML, PHP, JavaScript, SQL) and support snippets for shortcuts. The optional feature was simple project management, but I can replace this using the Windows Explorer. Why didn't I need debugging you said? Well, while the ability to debug your code step-by-step was nice, setting up one in web programming was not. In the end I still had to use echos and prints and var_dumps to do some basic debugging.

So I started using more simple editors. At first I used UltraEdit, but then changed to SciTe. InType was interesting and I've been trying it a lot lately. While it's not TextMate (yet), it's okay. These 'light-weight' editors let me concentrate on my coding then worry about using their features, not to mention setting up one on a new machine was a breeze. In the end, simplicity was the key. It let me focused on what needed to be done and not be bothered by unneeded things.

Recently I've stumbled across this editor called E-Text Editor, which was supposed to TextMate on Windows (even supported TextMate's snippets). I wonder what other features it has...