I fucking hate that PHPStorm is the only valid option for serious PHP framework development.

It's the opposite of free in every imaginable way: Expensive subscription license, hard to fully customize, closed source.

But there's just nothing even approaching the intelligence of intellisense. There are plugins for Vim, Atom, Sublime and VSCode which try to emulate it, but they are so fucking basic and dumb.

😠

Very true. I use PHPStorm at work so we have a business license covering it, but as an individual user it is kind of expensive unless you do major work in it.

I use to use NetBeans. From my experience it used to be great. But over time it's starts becoming a pain to use, from its lack of support for PHP (latest 9.0 only supports uptil 7.1), it's constant background scanning to check for files changes, and it's constant high CPU usage which has been an issue for god knows how long. I tried Atom but it was way too simplistic.

Right now I'm using VSCode as recommended by a friend. So far it's been pretty good. Just give it some more time and you might find it very a good alternative to PHPStorm.

Imho 90 bucks a year is not that much, given what it can do. Also you can get it for free with student discount....

@IdolWotaP @kolaente

Yeah true, having a cock inside your butthole does feel better with ample lube!

They don't accept my $10 Udemy receipt for a "student discount". And my boss does pay... but it still feels on the expensive side to me, and I really hate using an editor which starts complaining about not being able to call in to the license server when I'm offline.

I customized the hell out of the Jetbrains editors to make the acceptable, but their XML configs, theming options and plugin framework feels archaic compared to other products.

Of course VSCode can work if you edit a few separate PHP files, but a framework like Laravel in particular uses so much magic (composer autoloading, package registering, facades, magic calls & accessors) that VSCode extensions are worthless.

OK, maybe it's PHP's fault (once again 🙃💩) for only being able to support readable clean code through metaprogramming.

But I thought, for a change let's bitch at the IDE instead of the language 😁

@IdolWotaP 7.1 is a fairly recent version though, so I can't imagine it to be a real problem

You're right about the other things though

@Krokoklemme That is true. But 7.2 is the latest version and there's a few projects that I work on that use it. So it's more of a personal annoyance.

For me VS Code is the best free editor for PHP development. Hmm yeah but nothing beats PHPStorm's intellisense that's why it is paid and expensive mate. I'd rather spend on quality tutorials than PHPStorm 😎 @bittersweet do you agree?

The amount of time it saves me makes the 20 euro a month pretty cheap.

If I save only an hour of time every month its well worth it in my opinion.

I know this might me an unpopular opinion, but you can always pirate it. In my childhood we were really poor and without pirating in my early years i don't know if I would be a developer right now.

Visual Studio is pretty good tbh. And if you don't like it, Phpstorm license fees are really not that much for a productive developer.

@pionell if you make profit out of it you should pay for it.

If you are learning you should be allowed to use it for free. Thats probably also the reason the student version is free.

@smallearth It's more about the combination of closed off features why I feel conflicted about supporting it.

I've donated hundreds of euros to various open source projects, so it's not really about the money. It's the fact that it's an IDE which regularly needs an online connection to a license server, and I get a product which I can't truly make my own. It's like being more or less forced to own windows, just because you like playing games — it feels like a company you don't fully support has you by the balls, has such a monopoly on a feature that you just have to deal with their crap.

@Devnergy

I really don't get how people use VSCode or Atom on a large PHP project. Don't you get crazy from having to manually search which view is referred to in a controller, or how a method in a vendor package works under the hood?

JetBrains has an EarlyAccessProgram (EAP) the latest PHPStorm that I was able to find was this: https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm...

Basically it's a beta version, that may contains bugs, but therefore free to use (not sure about telemetry sending home as bug reports though... If you check it with wireshark, you should be able to block that using pihole or something)

I use PHPStorm every day. At work and at home - otherwise I'd go insane. I also dont find the pricing not to harsh - I have paid more for video games than for PHP Storm.

My boxen has a setup for multiple versions. I just change the symlink and can run different versions. Although I have the licence I rarely use it. Most of the time I run the EAP version. Reporting errors back to jetbrains feels good :)

There are license server files on the internet ;)

@PrivateGER Yeah, but it's not really about that.

It's not "fixed" until there's a serious open source competitor for PHP development, or at least some unix like binaries providing a consistent intellisense/inspection experience in various editors.

It's not even really about the cost, it's about me as a dev wanting to control my tools, being able to fully modify them. If Jetbrains threw up a Kickstarter to work on that, I'd dump more than a yearly license into it.

dude im a broke ass student and I can still afford to spend like a couple dollars a day to have decent tools

when u invest in a ide u invest in ur productivity

update:

I develop for a living aswell so decided to buy bcos student edition is just for education.

@dumpling Again, not so much about cost as it is about the inconveniences of licensing & the lack of openness/customizability.

I AM actually on a fully paid license server, but it has bailed out on me multiple times when traveling, and it pisses me off that PHP frameworks have evolved into such a magical glitterfilled shit show that the IDE needs to be heavy and smart to understand all the templating and metaprogramming crap.

1. You can use the free student license. Its cost is fair for professional devs.
2. Personally, I love customizing JetBrains' IDEs.
3. PHPStorm is based on the IntelliJ platform which is open source.

@iamgio Wow I did not know about 3, they certainly don't advertise it. Interesting!

I've been using netbeand for years with php and I love it!

I don't know. I use 100% keyboard and sublime. In the rare instances I have to actually look at the file tree I get fucking annoyed at how slow that is, so I never liked any ide. Ctrl+p and ctrl+r gets me in and out any file or method in milliseconds. Linter and autocomplete with key bindings and shortcuts and I can feel the adrenaline pumping already.

@bittersweet How do you get full completion and references in views, routes, controllers...?
This was always messy and incomplete for me. barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper perhaps?

@nnee
https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugi...

Plus a whole bunch of custom templates & snippets, similar to:

https://github.com/koomai/...