Review of PHP Storm from a former .Net Developer
Overall Satisfaction with PhpStorm
At our company, several of our developers use PhpStorm. For those of us that use it, it has been the best code editing environment for PHP. Between the color coding/formatting options, linting/code sniffing, macros, and source code search, it provides the most efficient environment.
Pros
- Organization and searching of source code. Very helpful when trying to navigate through 3rd-party code bases to figure out how they work.
- Customizing of formatting and skins. Everyone gets their own look and feel.
- Debugging allowing you to step through code and get any information you need.
- Code refactoring. Saves time when changing method/variable names. Helps prevent bugs when refactoring.
- Repository integration. Can commit to repositories from within application.
Cons
- Sometimes PHP Storm decides to re-index the code base (which allows for easier navigation) at inopportune times. With large code bases this can freeze up your environment for several seconds when you are trying to do things.
- Uses a lot of memory (not really an area for improvement, because it is a powerful tool so it will of course use a lot of memory).
- PhpStorm has allowed our development team to work much more efficiently, especially when integrating third party code or getting to know how other code bases work.
- It has made debugging of code much easier as stepping through any code base is very straightforward.
PhpStorm compares comparably to Visual Studio for a PHP development environment. It is the most powerful editing environment I have come across for PHP. Having a background in C#, it feels much closer to and similar in power to VS. Has many of the same built in functions that make editing and debugging code much faster.
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