Worked out with some effort, but I miss more flexible and configurable projects in NetBeans. I ended up constructing huge single project, combining multiple virtual hosts in Uniform Server with a lot of directories set to exclude and favorites lists acting as logical sub-projects. Projects also force separate windows (with tabs being for current project) and when you have three projects named www things get confusing fast. Projects are very folder-centric and basic stuff like renaming the thing is just not there. The concept of projects in PHPStorm is kind of weak. You can even put everything together and commit to different repositories and upload results to site all in single action. It also supports FTP and SFTP deployments. Mercurial is bit more raw and I had no chance to use Git parts yet. PHPStorm comes with extensive out-of-the-box support of version control systems. It is especially impressive that you can command to globally rename something and get accurate preview of changes (not only in code but in non-code text as well) and selectively tweak which parts to refactor or skip.
Refactoring (boring? necessary!) has plenty of functionality related to it. Much less time spent digging through folders and constructing search queries, much more time spent dealing with actual code. After search hotkeys set in – searching for anything (from files to class methods) is extremely snappy. I am big fan of incremental search and its implementation in PHPStorm is pretty much nirvana. It is continuously useful, both to jumpstart you on functionality initially and check what more can you use more in the long run. It gives you table of features with breakdown how much use each one saw so far. The cornerstone of productivity improvement is aptly named Productivity Guide available in menu under Help.
It’s not something that suddenly makes you productive, it is software that gives you such option if you spend effort to pursue it. It does not feel much different at first, concept and most of panels/tolbars are very much like those in any other IDE. It aims to provide highly productive development experience with focus on convenient interface, streamlined common operations and extensive set of features.
PHPStorm is cross-platform IDE that runs on Java. Since PHP (more precisely WordPress) development had became my main occupation I began to look more actively for good software to use and ended up moving from NetBeans to PHPStorm – PHP (as well as HTML/CSS and JS) IDE that claims to focus on productivity.
When it comes to tools of trade it is much easier to justify commercial software that ends up paying for itself by providing better convenience and productivity.
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