What is the best IDE for Magento development?

Question

Currently I'm using eclipse kepler as my IDE. Are there any better/more flexible IDEs available?

• Marius: I think this is a mater of choosing your weapon. I don't think "the best" IDE exists. Even if it does, someone will put an argument on the table explaining why it isn't the best :).
• Sukeshini: yes. But most of the experts suggests to use phpStorm. I don't know why? I've tried with it. But felt confused.
• Marius: Your comment makes my comment "more correct" :) . I also use PHPStorm and like it, but you don't. So...use what makes you comfortable and more productive. I've used in the past eclipse, aptana and Zend Studio. I liked all of them from a certain perspective and hated them from an other. I just needed to find a balance between good and bad.
• Sukeshini: Thanks for the response. Feels good to continue with eclipse. :)
• mnp: if you take a look at magicento.com (PhpStorm plugin) you might want to reconsider ;) It's a real productivity boost. Afaik theres nothing similar for any other IDE

Answer 1

PHPStorm is the IDE of my choice because it is really fast. It indexes fast, it searches fast and it starts fast.

And there is a plugin: magicento.

Have a look on the feature set it offers. It helps you a lot in the daily work.

PHPStorm with magicento is the only IDE i know of, which can handle really well large projects (which magento projects tend to) and offers a really huge magento magic functions support.

PHPStorm is NOT free.

• Milople Inc: Phpstrom is not free.
• Fabian Blechschmidt: Correct. PHPStorm is not free. I add this information. But if you ask me, a magento developer should have enough money to buy it. If not,raise your rate.

Answer 2

Currently I'm using Aptana Studio. This is mostly related to our current workflow, where the files are stored on FTP Servers. With Aptana I can access the files directly on the server without downloading the whole project. PHPStorm tries to download the whole project (so all of the Magento files!) when you set it up as remote project on FTP. I tried several settings with excluding some folders, but it's anyway no fun at all then as there's always something missing locally.

But as we are working on our new workflow, we will also switch to PHPStorm and magicento and I'm really looking forward to it!

• Petar Dzhambazov: Easy alternative for PHPStorm downloading FTP project is to have the project files already locally, and then in PHPStorm setup remote deployment with FTP/SFTP settings. This way you can set the option to deploy changed files on save and each time you save a file it will be pushed to remote server. The only drawback is that you will have a copy of the files locally. Which is not really drawback because indexing code is done locally.

Answer 3

My choice is Codelobster +special Magento plug-in: http://www.codelobster.com/magento.html

Answer 4

I've known many that use PHPStorm as mentioned above however one to keep an eye out on is Atom (by GitHub)