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behnampmdg3's avatar

PHPStrom Vs Sublime

Hello;

For the next 6 months, I am gonna spend 2 hours a day on Laravel.

I am using Sublime and it's free.

In your experience, is Phpstorm worth the money? Does it make life that much easier?

Or maybe sticking to Sublime is good enough?

Thanks

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5 replies
gregrobson's avatar

Personally I only work on small to medium sized projects where I tend to be one of only a small number of developers. I prefer Sublime's super fast speed and use a few select plugins that are stable and boost my productivity.

I could see that in heavy enterprise environments with many developers the ability of PHPStorm would be beneficial when you're navigating a large codebase (many namespaces, larger methods, refactoring work etc).

As part of your learning invest time in learning:

  • the keyboard shortcuts
  • the command palette
  • the goto bar (or equivalent in your app of choice)

Drill those features into your muscle memory! I can switch between different views, move files between views, jump to points on the page ... all without the mouse (like a Vim user!)

Typically I have no menu bar visible, just my two code editing panes. No minimap. No line numbers (they are in the status bar and I have CTRL+G to jump to a line).

Works pretty good for me.

bugsysha's avatar

I always use PhpStorm. When I need it to be more like text editor then I just turn on Power Save Mode and I can run on battery whole day.

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