Hi,

On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 10:33 -0800, Michael Shaw wrote:
> What editor do people use for PHP and Perl development.  I'm looking for 
> something with syntax highlighting and such, so that rules ut vi or gedit.
> 
> Thanks,
> Mike

I used the php-mode for emacs when I co-wrote the Zend Certification
Study Guide.  Unlike vim, emacs actually parses and understands the code
it's editing; this makes the syntax highlighting and indentation support
much more flexible and accurate.  I'd go as far as saying that the
auto-indentation support for php-mode for emacs is by far the best I've
worked with to date.

Today, I use the phpEclipse plugin for Eclipse 3.0.  I'm very happy with
this.  Performance is very good, the object browser works better than
php-mode for Emacs did, and it's very useful indeed to be able to search
all the files of a project from within the editor.  There's also the
advantage of being able to use other Eclipse plugins, such as support
for subversion.  phpEclipse is my main environment, which I use a good
8-10 hours in a working day.

I tried Zend Studio about 18 months ago, but didn't like it.  I found
the performance was too slow (hate using software that can't keep up
with my typing!), auto-indenting was inflexible (and I couldn't convince
Zeev why that mattered :(, there was no subversion support, and no
anti-aliased font support (tiring on the eyes when your main machine is
a laptop).  I haven't tried Zend Studio 4, and have no idea whether it
has improved in any of these areas or not.

Can't comment on a good environment for perl.  Last time I used perl
seriously was in '96.  Things have changed a lot since then.

Hope that helps,
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                         stuart@gentoo.org
Gentoo Developer                                  http://www.gentoo.org/
                                              http://stu.gnqs.org/diary/

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