I got myself a laptop, and it’s always kind of annoying to “start from scratch” – install all the applications you need, set up the browsers, set up email, install entertainment (codecs for movies, games)…
Since I didn’t have anything installed, and I kind of want to save space on the laptop as it doesn’t have gazillions of gigabytes of space like my desktop does, I was wondering what exactly do I need?
First and foremost
The tools of the trade. The editor and the IDE.
- Zend Studio for Eclipse – My PHP IDE of choice. Comes with pretty much anything one might need for PHP development. The only downside is that since it’s based on Eclipse, it’s a bit on the heavy side and likes to eat tons of memory which might not be a good thing on a laptop environment.
- Ultra-Edit 32 – Its site claims its the most popular editor, and it just might be. I personally find it has the features I need, such as FTP support and code highlight for PHP and such. Not to mention regex search and replace.
- GVim – Since I work on Linux machines from time to time, I’ve grown to like the Vim editor. It’s small, fast and probably has all the features as Ultra-Edit. It just doesn’t support FTP/SFTP editing as well on Windows, which is sometimes quite important for me. I will have to see which one I’ll be using more.
I also tried out the Komodo IDE since it seemed somewhat more lightweight than Zend Studio, as it isn’t based on Java. Initially I did quite like it, but it has some issues in the PHP code assist and I also had some issues with remote files.
//Example of the small code assist issue I had with Komodo: $front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance(); $front-> ( Zend Studio would now display the code assist box, but Komodo would not :( ) |
Tools
Other necessary tools for me are browsers, an ssh client, an FTP client, Photoshop and IM clients.
- Browsers – Latest Opera, Firefox (with Firebug, of course), IE7 and Multiple IE. Multiple IE deserves a special note: I can install IE7 as the “main” IE browsers on my box, and still test sites in IE6 (or even IE4..) with Multiple IE. Very useful.
- SSH Client – Putty. What else?
- FTP Client – WinSCP, the only client I’ve used for a long time. Lightweight and easy to use.
- Photoshop – Yes, there’s no question here. I need Photoshop to work with PSD files.
- IM clients – I use multiple instant messengers, and I have a separate client for each of them on my desktop. I decided to give Pidgin a shot for the laptop. Pidgin is a swiss-army IM client, supporting all IM networks I use, with the exception of Skype. So far I’m happy with Pidgin.
Other things
There are also a couple of other things that come in handy
- Apache HTTPD – The Apache web server
- RegexBuddy – While one could argue the usefulness of a program made solely for writing Regular Expressions, I can say that it has helped me a lot. Anyone who has written regular expressions probably know that sometimes it can be problematic to debug them, and this is one of the things where RegexBuddy helps. It’s also quite useful when you’ve forgot the syntax for something, such as negative lookback. The 30 euros it costs may sound a little iffy, but they do have a money back guarantee.
In closing
With the above package of software, one is more than ready for web development work. You could throw in Aptana as well, but I decided to leave it out for now at least. There are also tools like AutoHotKey, but they are not exactly related to coding or such.
One more handy thing to keep around are ebooks of various topics. The design patterns book, code complete etc. – especially on a laptop, since you might not have the books around, and of course, you can actually save some space from your luggage by leaving extra stuff home.
So what’s in your developer’s toolbox? I’d especially be interested in hearing about editors and IDE’s.