Cross Platform PHP Development With Or Without An IDE

PHPstorm 3.x

I have a confession. I love a good text editor. At the moment I'm on two platforms: Windows 7 and OS X Lion. I would prefer to use a cross platform solution for web development. That makes most sense. I also love Textmate. But recently I've been flirting with Sublime Text 2, which takes a lot of inspiration from Textmate. But it's cross platform, and pretty awesome.

I'm into PHP development and I've gotten to the point where I need a development tool that can handle proper PHP debugging. I've spent a couple of days reading things on the net and trying various solutions. So far I've checked out Netbeans 7.1, PHPstorm 3.0, Komodo Edit, and Eclipse PTD. I've played with some of these before, but never for a sustained time. All of these IDE's are butt ugly in my opinion. I guess I'm picky. I know, you can get used to ugly coding environments with time. I used to love Windows XP at one time, after all. I'm not going to go into too many details here, but I found that Netbeans 7.1 and Komodo were better than Eclipse. But I think of the IDE's out there for PHP it's hard to beat PHPstorm 3.x. It reminds me of visual studio in a lot of ways, except snappier.