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I recently tried the NetBeans IDE for PHP. I must say it is excellent! I have worked as a PHP developer for a couple of years, and in that time I have tried several PHP editors and IDE’s. NetBeans used to be exclusively for Java, but now it supports all kinds of programming languages including Ruby, C++, and PHP.

When I review a code-editor I look for:

• good basic editing features for manipulating text
• flexible syntax highlighting and shortcuts
• automatic indentation
• code completion
• bookmarks
• cliptext or other ways of inserting fequently used code-snippets
• good search and replace features
• options to extend functionalty (through scripting)
• price (NetBeans is free)

Nice, but not mandatory:

• integrated subversion
• diff-viewer
• debugging
• code folding
• database tools

I don’t know how easy it is to extend NetBeans, but it does meet all my other requirements.

For about a year I have been using PSPad for all my editing needs. Before that I use Notepad++ and Dreamweaver. PSPad is an excellent editor and has all the benefits that IDE’s do not (usually) provide. Most importantly it opens really fast, wich is very handy for quick editing of existing files. It also has a lot of great little features that you don’t often see in other editors. I will still use PSPad when I need to do quick hacks, but for lager projects I think there are great benefits of using an IDE, especially a powerful one such as NetBeans. You can get a glimpse of some of NetBeans editing features here and here. The NetBeans PHP learning trail is also a good place to learn about features and how use the IDE for PHP development.

Overall I think that NetBeans for PHP is far better than Eclipse (for PHP) and I also think that it is a serious competitor to Zend Studio.