NYCPHP Meetup

[Ajai Khattri]

On Wed, 12 Aug 2009, Paul A Houle wrote:

>     a little symbol appears on the side of the screen:  click on it and 
> it will offer you choices:  for instance,  it will correct typos if you

Syntax coloring usually tells me Ive mistyped and I see the typo right 
away. I dont want to waste a few seconds looking at messages and/or 
popups..
 
> type something that is almost like an existing method.  You can create 
> the method with one click,  or you can change the access level of the 
> method if you're not currently allowed to access it.  The UI is good 
> enough that it feels like a help,  not a hindrance.  The IDE highlights 
> methods and variables that don't get used;  there are at least 20 
> different automated refactorings that make changes (like pushing methods 
> up & down a class hierarchy or renaming methods) automatically.  Yes,  
> you can just click on the definition of a method,  class,  or variable,  
> type in a new name,  and it gets changed everywhere...  In seconds,  
> without ever making mistakes.  All of that helps compensate for the 
> additional artifacts that you need to write Java.

My dislike of IDEs has little to do with the features, but more to do with 
the fact that *for me*, having to move my hands away from the keyboard to 
click the mouse buttons is an annoyance and a waste of time. This is why I 
learn all the keyboard shortcuts and add utilities that give me stuff I 
cannot normally control from the keyboard (like switching to console 
Quake-style). I use a Mac all day and use the mouse plenty, but when Im 
in the zone coding its just me and the keyboard.

>     Eclipse/Java also has a debugger that ~works~.  There are a lot of 
> reasons for it,  but I've never been able to build a PHP debugging 
> system with a PHP IDE that really works.   No more having debugging 
> "echo" statements winding up in production code...

And you've probably never used XDebug or FirePHP.



-- 
Aj.