As a PHP developer I have tried out a few IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans, Zend Studio, Aptana, vim, emacs etc) during the years but in the end I have always ended up with me going back to an older version of Eclipse PDT. Not because it is the best editor per se but mainly because of one little nitty-gritty feature that none else seems to care about. At least considering I cannot really find any articles, blog articles, or twitter messages about the matter.

The feature I was missing is the outline displaying inherited members and methods of super/parent classes, as seen in the two following screenshots. This was implemented by the PDT team sometime in first stable version but then magically vanished in the release of PDT 2.x, apparently without anyone missing it except for me.

Quick outline view, triggered by CMD+O (mac) CTRL+O (win/*nix).

I’ve requested this feature on the PDT mailing list as well as voted in on bug reports in their track system a while back but so far no luck. Because of this I have stuck to the older version of Eclipse which of course has it drawbacks. But considering this is the main feature I use to navigate around the code base (which is rather big at work) I cannot live work without it.

Well, this was the frustrating truth until recently since it now actually seems like Netbeans finally implemented this feature. I have discarded this IDE earlier because I considered it to be too slow and unresponsive with a larger code base but maybe that has improved as well. At least I hope so. Tomorrow I will give it a try and see how it works out. An IDE comparison might come up at a later point.

Sorry Eclipse PDT, but finally it looks like we need to go separate ways.