Impressions with Netbeans 6.7 M3 for PHP

A recent contract job required me to work on-site, which meant that I had to use my laptop as my primary development rig. In eclipse, my low-end 1st gen Macbook Air crawls to its knees (surprise!) when I load it up with a 5000+ file project (including libraries).

Textmate is normally my tool of choice. But since we use a monster framework, code completion and inline documentation will undoubtedly boost my productivity and increase my familiarity with the existing API + codebase, not to mention the added benefit of a debugger to step through the code to know wtf is going on.

I went on a mission to find a new IDE. I decided to revisit Netbeans for PHP (I use it for Java already) by trying out the prerelease. After using Netbeans 6.7 M2 (and recently M3) for 2 months at work, aside from the occasional bugs, I could not be more impressed by its performance and feature-set. If you do decide to try it out, make sure you use the latest milestone release. That would be 6.7 M3 as of this post.

Lets look at some of the key features that I use on a daily basis.

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