Recommend me some good PHP text editors that you guys use. (Preferably free). I'm using Notepad right now and its difficult to create nicely formatted code.

I've used Crimson for like 7 or 8 years. Still swear by it.

The new version sucks, though. I had it for about 10 minutes and got fed up with it and went back to the old version.

Visual Studio 2008

I'm a big fan of gvim, I use it almost exclusively. When I used to use windows a lot I used EditPlus. It's not free, but I think it's pretty cheap. And well worth it.

PHP plugin for NetBeans or Eclipse

Notepad++ is what I use for almost everything. Syntax highlighting and bracket collapsing.

I use dreamweaver, easy to navigate and upload files to your server

If you're one of the lucky ones who can run it without your machine grinding to a halt, Aptana + PHP Plugin.

I'm starting to use Notepad++. For a while I just used Notepad but I really do need syntax highlighting. It helps that Notepad++ can do HTML syntax highlighting in the same document... and it looks like there's some JS too and brace-matching works for CSS.



What, that's not going to have built-in syntax highlighting for ASP's main competitor!

NetBeans trounces everything else in terms of IDE support for PHP. Aptana's PHP plugin is actually pretty terrible (which is suprising since Aptana is great with JS).

Also, there's a visual studio plugin for PHP (I don't think it's free), and it's terrible as well, probably the worst of the bunch, mostly because it's unstable.

Finally, you have the regular text editors:

Notepad++, E (http://www.e-texteditor.com/ - PC's TextMate), PSPad (My favorite).

Zend Studio is by far the best I've used. I've used it at work for the last 2 years.

Version 5.5 is in some ways better than 6. 6's FTP support is shockingly bad. You cant make projects with remote files... which for some reason means no code completion, you can't run code in the editor because you cant set include paths and when you're working with 4 other developers on a development server this is a severe restriction. We went back to 5.5.

In my new job where I'm the only developer and I am running a local development machine, I use 6. For a start it supports swapping character encoding on files and the project management is far superior to 5.5

It's stupidly expensive though. I wouldn't use it if I didn't get it paid for by my company. For free, I'd use Eclipse with the PHP plugin. It's not as good as Zend's PHP plugin but it does the job.

I'd never rely on my editor for handling remote files, I'd just use ExpanDrive and treat remote drives as local ones.

There is also phpDesigner but I found it useless