Please note that the information in this post may no longer be accurate or up to date. I recommend checking more recent posts or official documentation for the most current information on this topic. This post has not been updated and is being kept for archival purposes.

About a year and a half ago I went on a quest to find the perfect IDE. Since then, it’s never really stopped but I have settled on PhpStorm as my go to editor of choice. The latest version to be released is PhpStorm Version 6 and is a major release with some significant improvements.

PhpStorm 6: Now Sleeker than Ever

Check out these screenshots of my customized UI and code theme for PhpStorm. I’m using Darkula theme for the UI and Eli’s Dark code style. The code highlighting is less-pastel colored than the Darkula code style. The php tags are highlighted in red and the variables pop out nicely in soft green.

IDE Images:

PhpStorm 6 Darkula

CSS File using Eli’s Dark theme

Check out the nice folder icons:

php-storm-icons

Do you know what this latest version reminds me of? Sublime Text 2 out-of-the-box. Everyone loves Sublime Text 2 and rightfully so. I agree, it looks and feels nice to work with but I found PhpStorm worked better for my needs and have managed to turn a number of developers onto it.

Keep in mind the screenshots above are on a Windows 7 computer, not a Mac. Personally, I think PhpStorm and applications in general looks much sleeker on a Mac. I’m planning on getting my own soon, but for now it’s Windows.

Additional Highlights of PhpStorm 6 include:

  • Composer dependency manager for PHP support
  • Code (re)arranger – control the structure of your existing and generated code
  • New refactorings: Change Signature, Pull Up/Push Down class members, and Move Class
  • Smarter namespace handling – Auto-import, Optimize Imports and more
  • Fully customizable templates, including PHPDoc
  • More code inspections, smarter code completion, and better runtime error prevention
  • New database schema editor and change tracking tools

PhpStorm 6 also provides a brand new web toolkit:

  • Built-in REST Client to test RESTful web services right from the IDE
  • File Watchers – for easy Sass, LESS, SCSS, CoffeeScript, TypeScript transpilation
  • Full-featured debugging of TypeScript, Dart or CoffeeScript with source maps
  • Refined handling of JS libraries, including minified versions detection
  • Re-worked HTML structure view with support for HTML5
  • Emmet abbreviations support for faster HTML & CSS coding

Do you use PhpStorm? If so, what do you think about the latest version? Please leave a comment below!

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