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Yesterday I was desperate for a free good programmer's editor for Mac OS. I used jEdit so far. It is a good editor but key bindings are non-standard, it is written in Java and looks terrible. So I wanted something different.
I searched the Internet. Some people say that BBEdit is "de facto" standard on Mac OS but I found it slow and buggy (try opening diff files with it!). So I went to Apple software catalog and searched there. After trying five or six editors I landed on Komodo Edit.
Komodo Edit is a product of ActiveState - a company known well for Perl for Windows. After [unsuccessful] evaluation of other editors I almost gave up and was skeptic about Komodo Edit but first three minutes showed me that it is exactly what I needed!
Syntax highlighting for PHP/JavaScript/CSS, great default font/colors, autocomplete for PHP/JavaScript/CSS, project support, very intuitive interface - what else the programmer like me may need? It just a perfect editor! It even supports projects, which I tried immediately by creating a project for my test TYPO3 installation.
While trying autocomplete I found that Komodo Edit does not support (yet) the following Zend Studio specific syntax for type hinting:
$tce = t3lib_div::makeInstance('t3lib_TCEmain');
/* @var $tce t3lib_TCEmain */
$tce->start($data, null);
In Zend Studio the bolded text tells Studio about variable type. Komodo supports only normal PHPDoc commens for variables. So I went to ActiveState web site and submitted a feature request for Zend Studio-like comments. I did not have a big hope that it will be fixed, so I was very surprised when I got a response that it is acknowledged and test for it is added to source code of Komodo. And after some time bug even had a patch for adding this functionality! I was amazed. Never saw such a great support before for any other product!
As a result I took a closer look to their commercial product: Komodo IDE. There is a 21-day evaluation license. On start IDE picked up all settings that I already customized in Komodo Edit and even opened the same project (btw, files open with cursor on the same line where I left them!). What a nice surprise!
Komodo IDE works with XDebug - open source debugging extension for PHP. It can even install XDebug to PHP with a single click of a button. Since my Mac is 64-bit, I could not use this functionality (it is for 32-bit platform only for now) but it took me a minute or two to download, compile and install XDebug plugin to PHP (instructions are on the XDebug web site).
Debugging runs very fast, variables are shown properly. The only small glitch happened due to my wish to try debugger faster. I started debug while Komodo IDE was still processing my huge test site tree. Therefore it did not stop on the breakpoint inside typo3conf/. I waited for 3 minutes and tried again - it stopped where it should. Accidentally I found that (unlike Zend Studio & Debugger), Komodo & Xdebug can debug more than one script at a time.
Other goodies of Komodo IDE & XDebug include FireFox plugins for starting PHP debug from browser (just like Zend Studio) and for debugging JavaScript in Komodo IDE (haven't tried it yet). CVS and Subversion is also integrated.
So far I am very impressed with Komodo IDE. Its price is prety high ($295, similar to Zend Studio). But it is much more worth these money than Zend Studio. I will run trial for some more time and spend rest of my PayPal money to buy Komodo IDE (hope they accept PayPal).
Good work, ActiveState!
