[UPHPU] introducing Coda: one window web development

[Lamont Peterson]

On Tuesday 24 April 2007 10:52:09 am John David Anderson wrote:
> On Apr 24, 2007, at 10:26 AM, Scott Hill wrote:
> > I'm just not sure how or if
> > some of these great IDEs could help me.
>
> Disclaimer: your mileage may vary with these. Vim can probably do
> some of these, I may not be aware.
>
> Here's somethings than (g)vi(m) doesn't quite do for me that Zend
> Studio (or things like Coda or Textmate do)
>
> 1. Code completion: variable names, global constants, php functions,
> etc. Mostly this is for speed and avoiding spelling mistakes, but
> it's also nice to look up params for PHP's brilliantly architected
> function library.

vim does it; just need a little configuring, which I've never bothered to do, 
but looked up once (it's not hard to set up).  Supports more languages than 
you've probably heard of :) .

> 2. Snippets. TextMate's are fantastic. I can place variables,
> fallback values, substitutions, tab stops, placeholders, mirrors,
> transformations, shell code insertions, etc.

vi does it and vim has extra support for it.  You just have to set it up.

> 3. Project views. I like some way to narrow down what part of the
> filesystem I'm working with. Its also really nice to have files in
> tabs, *especially* remote files.

There are ways to do this from within vi and vim, and vim has some extra 
capabilities.  Vim 7 introduced support for tabs and each tab can also be 
split and vsplit if you like.

> 4. Debugging. Zend's is especially nice. In a world where interfaces
> are becoming increasingly rich, you can't die($foo) to get the data
> you need (its really hard to do this in the middle of a complex AJAX
> request or a Flash remoting call).

vi and vim both have excellent support for integrating debuggers, but they are 
geared a bit more towards debugging compiled code.  If you got a separate 
debugger program for working with PHP, vi and vim could integrate it, 
however, I think this is a point where Zend Studio can really shine.

Personally, I would like to see more IDEs give you the option of "embedding" 
whichever text editor you want.  I've played with some things that let you 
embed vim/gvim in a GUI IDE (mostly KDE stuff, as KDE itself supports 
embedding vim/gvim in virtually any K app that uses kwrite).  It's very nice 
if you know vi/vim and want to use it.

Personally, I have mostly used CodeWright when coding PHP on a Windows box and 
Kate (KDE programmers editor) on Linux.  I do use vi/vim from time to time 
and have also use KDevelop.  It's been a while since I tried Zend or any of 
the others mentioned here.  But I wish I had a Mac to try out Coda on.  ")
-- 
Lamont Peterson <peregrine at OpenBrainstem.net>
Founder [ http://blog.OpenBrainstem.net/peregrine/ ]
GPG Key fingerprint: 0E35 93C5 4249 49F0 EC7B  4DDD BE46 4732 6460 CCB5
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