Every time someone raises that question, there will always be someone suggesting PHPed and PHP Coder. That is because there isn't pretty much anything else so far. Or isn't there?
What these two editors (and Editplus) have of useful are: syntax highlighting, code snippet storage and auto complete. And that is it. UltraEdit (www.ultraedit.com) has it all and then some more. I discovered it a long time ago, but never paid attention to it. It seemed to be just another plain text editor, and maybe it was actually just that back then. It's evolved a lot and, looking at the latest changes, it really seems to be heading towards the Web authoring side. When I got interested in Web programming, I gave it another try and now depend on it a little more each day. I often find myself doing everything with it, from PHP scripts to regular HTML pages. At first, I missed those most common and handy HTML buttons I used to have in HTML editors, but then I realized that I can just run macros and insert snippets to achieve the same result I did with buttons.
If you decide to try it, be patient. It has a lot of hidden features, a lot of manual reading is required if you want to leverage all it's got to offer. Quite some time then must be invested in customizing the toolbar and syntax highlighting according to your taste, recording macros and storing code snippets. And don't forget to download additional PHP words to graft into your Wordfile.txt. But it's all worthwhile in the long run.
Cheers,
Luciano ES
Santos - SP - Brasil
