@Magnus von Bromsen – “The ultimate IDE” for any language is A LOT more complicated than the glorified, svn-aware FTP client that Coda is. And it seems that Panic spends more time messing with the CSS rendering than real features like auto-completion, code-parsing, style enforcement and syntax highlighting (jQuery in an eZ Publish template anyone? I gave up…). IDE vs Client is a world apart.

Are you still using Coda for ZF projects?

I’m in the same position as many of you here above: wants a editor with project-wide autocompletion but just can’t stand the Java based one.

I just don’t understand why Panic or MacRabbit can’t do “The Ultimate PHP IDE for Mac”?

when I’m working on PHP I use TextMate or Vim. neither are perfect, but where one fails the other generally does very well, so I’ll generally have both open.

TextMate isn’t the fastest creature, but there are some 3rd party tweaks you can apply that make it run faster by doing things like disabling project re-scans when the app regains focus.

I’ll second Netbeans (although I’m still on 6.5.1). They have a version tailored specifically for PHP (so no Java or C++ syntax/library overhead). Yes, it’s Java, and yes, like most people I initially thought “no way”.

But like you I code large ZF-based projects. And as much as I *love* Coda, it is simply too painful coding without proper auto-complete.

Netbeans will happily parse the /library folder for you, so everything in Zend (or any other library for that matter) will appear in the autocomplete. It also parses variables defined in your script, so $a-> will pop up an autocomplete of methods and properties for the class $a was defined as.

SVN integration is very good (I don’t use it as such an advanced level as you though, but all the standard functionality works fine).

One thing: if you find netbeans hogging the CPU, switch off the Tasks plugin, as otherwise it rescans all your source code (not incremental changes) for TODO,todo etc every time.

Bottom line: if Panic make Coda more Zend-friendly, I’d ditch Netbeans in an instant. As it is, Netbeans si the best ZF IDE on Mac that I have found to date.

You should definitely check it out. The lighter version called Komodo Edit is, I think, free and very well capable. The IDE versions comes with a bit of a hefty price tag but well worth it.

Plus, it’s not to shabby to look at either.

you should definitely take a look at Netbeans but be sure to download version 6.7M2 or newer as they revamped the UI and added some really nice PHP integration. There are also a lot of plugins e.g. SVN, Git, integration testing…

Greetings and happy testing.

Most importantly, it needs to be using a recent version of Java. I don’t know what the Java situation is like under OS X, but certainly under Linux, by default it used to use the Ubuntu-supplied open source version of Java. Installing Sun’s latest Java binaries and telling Eclipse to use them sped things up by an order of magnitude.

Secondly, allow it to use more RAM. There are some config params which you can tweak to help with this (google for Xms and Xmx). From what I remember, the default limit is either 128MB or 258MB. I changed this to 1024MB.

The biggest project I have open at the moment is about 40MB of PHP code (including ZF and some other libraries, excluding SVN dirs), and the auto-completion menu when typing Zend_ does open instantly.

Disabling the validators can help with speed if it’s still slow after all that, and I agree that the way the HTML auto-completion works is annoying (I disabled this).

I think some developers will always prefer text editors over full blown IDEs and vice versa. And of course the spec of the machine you’re developing on is a big factor. But I do think Eclipse is let down a little by some poor default settings, and the stigma associated with Java apps. Once you get it working, it’s great.