I’ve bee through a number of different editors for coding PHP, including PHPStudio, Dreamweaver, Eclipse, Zend Studio for Eclipse. The quality of those editors ranged from great (eclipse) to terrible (Zend studio for eclipse, crashing buggy nightmare). I had some kind of negative issue on each of those platforms, generally things not working properly or certain functionality missing.
So I’ve made the leap to using Vim fulltime as a PHP editor. The main advantage with VIM is that it can be found on pretty much every UNIX/OS X server on the internet. I can log in and with some VIM knowledge continue editing a file quickly and easily. No need to depend upon platform specific and expensive editing software.
To get started in vim on OS X the quickest way is to open a terminal window and type vimtutor and you’ll be presented with a pretty simple tutorial. I just burned through that to make sure I had the basics down, then moved onto the help section and looked into creating new windows in vim (very cool) and search commands and patterns (very powerful). In about 4-5 hrs you can go from VIM noob to vim intermediate. Even if you don’t want to make it your fulltime editor and prefer something like dreamweaver, it’s a handy skill to have for editing files efficiently on UNIX boxes.
