PHP CODE EDITOR - gPHPEdit
VERSION: 0.4.3 WEB: www.gphpedit.org
PHP, formerly the "Personal Home Page" tools and now the "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor" (celebrating the hacker tradition of recursive acronyms) is a scripting language for the Web with a gigantic following. It's also ideal for other general-purpose coding chores, and if you've been following Paul Hudson's PHP tutorials in recent issues of Linux Format, you may be looking for a specialised code editor. Programs for hacking C, HTML and other languages have existed for some time; now PHP is starting to see it's own dedicated softtware and gPHPEdit is looking notably strong here.
After we put gPHPEdit on our coverdisc a few issues back, lead developer Andy Jeffries asked if we could give it some coverage in Hot Picks. It's been a while since the last release - earlier this year - but the editor already sports a nifty sum of features with a good deal more in the works. Being built around GNOME 2, you'll need the GTK2 and GNOME development packages installed if you're building from source. Similarly , the Scintilla editing component is required, and we've supplied RPMs to make things quicker. It should be noted that gPHPEdit has not had a stable release yet, but many of the common problems that people encounter when using it have been ironed out - see the bug tracker on the website for more details.
gPHPEdit's clean and unobtrusive interface follows the usual window furniture strategy of a two-pane display, and toolbar for access to common operations. The left pane contains a class list for speedy navigation around large files, while the right holds the main syntax highlighted editing box. Satisfyingly, gPHPEdit makes use of tabs for multiple open documents, and the editor allows code blocks to be collapsed and expanded for readability. Well crafted.
Another handy adition is the ability to check the current code for errors via the php binary itself, as is the drop-down list for long function names and the macro recorder (although it'd be a bonus if it could store more than one). The Scintilla component performs excellently; it's fast and doesn't suffer from the odd cosmetic glitch as we've seen with others. gPHPEdit does work commendably well as a specialised editor without getting bogged-down in IDE functionality and is swift and reliable to boot. All regular PHPers should give it a good test run.
Taken from Linux Format November 2003 - Issue 46.