

Best all around free IDE for mac - isurfbecause

What would be a good free ide for jquery, javascript, and php?
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egiva
You're opening up a whole can of words with this question! Everyone has their
favorite IDE when it comes to PHP. An example of this is an excellent forum
discussion about your different options:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/116292/what-is-the-
best-i...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/116292/what-is-the-best-ide-for-
php)

If you're interested in free software, you're pretty much limited to something
that is eclipse-based. I've tried most of the major ones, including Komodo,
Zend Studio (not free), Aptana Studio, etc. There's also NetBeans (not
eclipse-based), if you have experience working with NetBeans for Java
development.

Learning any IDE is a big investment in time and you'll get a zillion
different responses because a choosing a good IDE for you depends on your
goals. If you're just learning PHP for the first time, and goal is to have an
integrated debugger (helps you find mistakes in your code), then I really
suggest the Zend Studio IDE along with Zend Server to host your applications.
Zend Server is similar to XAMPP. Working with those two together will allow
you to more easily trace code, debug, etc. Zend Studio isn't free, but you
could find a version out there somewhere or get an unused copy from a friend.
Negative: not a lot of tutorials or info out there about setting it up, but a
while ago I managed to do it without many problems.

Otherwise I would suggest Aptana: <http://www.aptana.com/> It's free and there
is considerable support if you search Google for answers to your
challenges/questions.

Good Luck! Maby let us know if you're just getting started learning PHP, or if
you have experience with another language/IDE - that would help everyone
figure out what the best option for you might be.

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isurfbecause
Thanks bro, u guys are tight. Let's see, I am a coldfusion developer and use
dreamweaver at work but on PC. I've also done some flex apps using
flashbuilder which is eclipse. I guess I could use dreamweaver or eclipse for
mac.... I googled mac ide reviews, but i'm still on the fence. I'm sure i
could find an unused copy of zend studio. I was just wondering what does
industry use, if I wanted to switch over to be a php developer. I was hoping
to get a majority vote on an IDE but ur right, it is opening a can of worms.

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onedognight
I suggest <http://emacsformacosx.com/> .

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dget
I <3 emacs, but there's not really a reasonable PHP mode for it that handles
interspersed HTML well.

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onedognight
Have you tried nXhtml? If so, what do you consider unreasonable about it? It
works well for me.

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dget
I used it for a while. Indentation would always break in really awkward ways.

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mobiplayer
I love Espresso and Coda, in that order.

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isurfbecause
Cool I haven't heard of Espresso. I'll research more on that

