Best macOS IDE for CakePHP 3.x?

#1

Anyone have any opinions on the best setup for CakePHP coding on a Mac?

I’ve used Coda, Sublime 2, BBEdit, and TextMate through the years but never found anyone to be “killer” when it comes to CakePHP I know most of these editors allow for plugins, but I have yet to find any for Cake 3.x.

Code completion, syntax-checking, and something like snippets all tailored to Cake 3.x would be the holy grail.

BBEdit was my goto editor way back in the day, then TextMate because it’s so much faster (auto-quotes, self-closing braces and shortcut for tag closure)… but TextMate got mired in a never shipped 2.0 that has finally shipped but it’s changed so much I haven’t had to time to bother figuring it out. So now I use Coda. It’s nice in many ways but really deficient in some others.

Oh another thing: only native app suggestions please. I have no time or patience for non-native apps.

#2

For me it’s definitely PHPStorm :smiley:

It’s available for mac, windows and linux and is a full-fledged IDE, not just an “editor”.
As far as I can tell, it offers pretty much every feature you can think of, and a bunch of ones you probably didn’t even imagine XD

And despite its ridiculous amount of functionality it’s still very fast.

It’s not free but totally worth every penny!

#3

Thank you. I was excited to see CakePHP support explicitly mentioned.

Sadly, I installed the trial version and discovered it is not a native app which pretty much disqualifies it for me.

No one else seems to support CakePHP however. So I’m left deciding whether I care more about native-ness or about Cake support.

#4

Oh, how does that affect your experience?

I’m not on a mac, but a friend of mine uses PHPStorm on his Mac Book Pro and is actually really happy with it.

But tbh I’m not entirely sure what benefits native on mac os gives you; Is it about performance or usability?

#5

It’s just environmental. Workflow and habits. Filesystem browsing and manipulation.
Also, there is (to me) an unsettling look and experience things almost seem to flicker and either lag or trigger prematurely in Java (and Flex). It’s as if I were driving a car and the physics of reality changed ever so slightly.

#6

For me and everyone I know who is working with CakePHP only PHPStorm is considered. I am not very familiar with the editors but so far the search, the support, the built in terminal and the VCS are just a few super convenient features of PHPStorm.

You can change the look if you dislike it.

The only problem I encountered so far, was that the scrolling became uncomfortable after last Mac update…

#7

I’ve decided to get by with Sublime Text 3.

Maybe over time I can roll my own completions and snippets for Cake in it. But I seriously cannot tolerate java apps. Just a complete non-starter. You may as well consider me allergic. Or spoiled. I don’t care—it is what it is.

Enjoying my UX the way it suits me is why I use a Mac in the first place.