Netbeans is awesome

If you still can’t find that ‘perfect’ IDE give Netbeans a try. I was recently introduced it and am still blown away by the amount of functionality and features it has. It’s similar to eclipse but I always found eclipse to be too sluggish to use on windows (everything seemed to take half a second to do which adds up and gets frustrating very fast).

The main things I like

  • Plugins for things like CoffeeScript, SCSS, Maven etc which make life a lot easier.
  • Shortcuts for just about everything, so if you’re a keyboard ninja you can get things done really fast.
  • It has everything else you’d expect in an IDE (code completion, jumping to definitions etc).

I’ve been using PHPDesigner for about 2 years now and although it’s great for developing in PHP it doesn’t have the best support for other languages such as Javascript, Coffeescript and Ruby.

If you’re a Windows coder give it a whirl, it’s open source and free.