I know this subject comes up from time to time, but i'm looking for what's the state-of-the-art right now. I found having a debugger made learning PHP much easier than it otherwise would have been. I know a lot of people use simple text editors and rely on the php output, but having a debugger is great for beginners.
I'm using Komodo version 3.01 on windows, and it worked well enough I bought a personal license for it (US$30 - good deal). It generally works well, with a few problems.
1) During debugging Komodo won't sort the variable alphabetically. This makes the debugger almost worthless when you have big files of constants that you want to use.
2) During debugging it often gets confused if you turn remote debugging on and off. The apache.exe process gets confused and terminates.
3) The realtime code syntax checking is at best acceptable, often not much use at all.
I looked at the Zend IDE, it looks nicer and is a bit snappier to use, but I couldn't be bothered spending the time to get remote debugging working. Also, to use remote debugging beyond 30 days you have to pay US$250 for a license. I wish they had a personal license option available.
I've also heard that Eclipse (the IBM Java IDE) can also do PHP, but I haven't looked into this. Anyone tried it?
So what do you all think the best IDE around right now is?
