I think the first "IDE" I ever used for web development would have to be Adobe Dreamweaver (nee Macromedia). Ok, so maybe it was Microsoft FrontPage, but that shouldn't really count. [...] This post is about my experience moving away from the oft-maligned program and some lessons learned in my quest for the perfect IDE.

He tried out several options including Netbeans, Eclipse (PDT), Sublime Text 2 and one he found the most appealing, PHPStorm.

Looking back I realize that IDE's have been a constant annoyance and yet have prompted so much growth and development in my skill level. [...] I also think that the problems I have ran into with IDE's are true about software in general. We search for better solutions and always fall short.

As the interest seems to be there, I thought it would be a great idea to follow up with a post taking you step by step through how I've set up Sublime Text 2 for PHP development, and showing you some of the useful features that you get out of the box with Sublime Text 2.

He's come up with some screencasts of his setup so you can see the useful features in action. He points out a few things to install or that use can use to make your development simpler:

• Package Control
• the Soda theme
• how to edit user preferences
• using the "Goto Anything" bar
• using the PHP snippets plugin
• DocBlockr for documentation blocks
• Sublime linter
• Goto Documentation

...and much more. This flexible editor makes it easy to customize just about everything in your environment and with more and more plugins/packages popping up all the time, there's a good chance the feature you need will be introduced soon.

It seems that the editor of the moment is Sublime Text 2 and sadly I have to tip my hat to Gary Rockett for showing it off to me one day.. Since that day, I've been a 100% convert. [...] So, I decided to peak into the PHPUnit [plugin from Stuart Herbert] to see if I could create a DocBlox Plugin. It turns out you have to write Plugins in Python, which is interesting, since I know very little python. There seemed to be enough code there to get me going, so I now have a working DocBlox Plugin.

The result is a plugin that, once installed gives you a new context menu option to "Generate documentation" for the selected file. The console shows the progress of the build. You can get the plugin from Package Control or by grabbing it from github directly.

Sublime Text 2 is a new cross-platform text editor that I've recently switched to. It's still in public beta, but already offers better performance (and battery life!) and a better look (fonts that render properly!) than Java-based IDEs such as Netbeans. One thing it didn't have was support for PHPUnit, so I've made a plugin. It's available to install via Package Control.

The plugin allows you to directly create tests for a class using a context menu's "Test This Class" option. You can also run the tests directly from the editor and use either the menu or direct text commands to control it. He's also gathering some other well-used PHP snippets into another related plugin, the Additional PHP Snippets plugin.

As with a lot of editors, Sublime Text supports snippets which are essentially text expansions of a short phrase into more text. I needed to create a few getXxx() and setXxx() methods for some properties of a class and decided that the easiest way to do this would be with a snippet.

Included in the post is the code you'll need to put into the snippet - a simple find (regular expression based) looks at the currently selected variable and expands out the getter and setter for it. For more information on the Sublime Text 2 editor, see the product's website.