[wp-hackers] WebIDE supporting WordPress? (based on IntelliJ)

[Mike Schinkel]

Hey all,

I've been on Windows for years and found PhpEd to be an incredibly great PHP editor+debugger (for all you on Windows, check it out.)  I recently switched to Mac (and am still on the fence over which is better) but I've been looking for a replacement for PhpEd on Windows. 

I've really wanted an IDE vs. a text editor as I prefer a full debugger so TextMade and Espresso just didn't make the cut. I've not looked at Eclipse because everyone tells me it's so slow and bloated but I did look at Aptana, NetBeans and Komodo.  Unfortunately Aptana was way bloated and slow, NetBeans was also boated and slow, especially during debugging and I could never get it to work properly, and Komodo while good was not great and for US$299 I just couldn't get myself to consider it.

Anyway, someone on Twitter suggested IntelliJ and after looking around I found a beta project they are working to release in early 2010 called WebIDE.  I've been using it for about a week and it is surprisingly solid for a beta (I've had no crashes with it) and if you can ignore some of their ideology that means they don't support "New" in the file menu, have no "Save As" option, and don't support a simple "File Rename" (it must be done as a refactored rename) it's feature set is really, really good.

You can learn more about it here:

	http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2009/08/web-ide-—-intellij-idea-for-html-and-php-developers/

You can download the "early access program" version here to try it out:

	http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/WI/Web+IDE+EAP

What's even better, from what I've seen I think there's a good chance it's an IDE that could recognize and support refactoring for the WordPress "hook" system.  I've submitted a feature request to this effect and if you agree it would be great to have an IDE that recognized the WordPress hook system then please go vote up this feature request: 

http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/WI-852

My hope is to show JetBrains that the WordPress developer community could be a huge market for them.

-Mike Schinkel
P.S. My only real hope is they price WebIDE when released at no more than US$149 and better at US$99.