While I am still trying to come up the learning curve with programming in PHP, in earlier days when I started with PHP, I found it very difficult and annoying to work with PHP scripting in standard HTML editors with no syntax highlighting. Then I searched for editors in PHP.net site and came across this link – http://www.midnighthax.com/phpeditors.php. It has a list of editors that are free, commercial and rich in features. But then I had to download (some of) them, test and uninstall until I found the one which suited best to my requirements. It was PSPad which I found very easy to work with and also which has the features I was looking for.
PSPad for PHP
Features of PSPad
- Save desktop session to later reopen all open files
- FTP client
- Macro recorder to record, save and load macros
- Templates (HTML tags, scripts, code templates…)
- Syntax highlighting auto set by file type
- Full HEX editor
- Call external programs
- Integrated TiDy library for formatting and checking HTML code
- Conversion to CSS, XML, XHTML
- Reformat and compress HTML code, tags char case change
- Spell checker
- Internal web browser with APACHE support
PSPad also supports localization and the the languages currently supported are: Bosnian, Brazilian, Catalan, Chinese Big5, Chinese GB, Croatian, Czech, Deutsch, English, French, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kurdish, Malay, Nederlands, Norsk, Polski, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Srpski, Suomi, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.