PHP Designer

PHP Designer is a professional coding tool that comprises dedicated features for editing, debugging, analyzing and publishing PHP scripts.

And although the term “professional” may scare beginners, it's probably worth mentioning that PHP Designer has been developed as a tool addressed to rookies and experienced users alike.

With support for PHP 4 and PHP 5+, the application boasts a powerful syntax highlighter that works not only with PHP, but also with JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, Smarty, SQL, HTML and XHTML, Java and C#.

The amount of features is absolutely impressive; it includes a fully customizable editor with special characters and drag and drop support, advanced exporting tools to LaTeX, RTF and HTML, auto completion and correction, bracket highlighting, search and print.

It comes with format tools and tags for HTML, code explorer for CSS, code tips for JavaScript, real-time syntax check for each of them and Xdebug functionality for PHP scripts.

PHP Designer sports plenty of customization options and this is probably the main thing that makes it a bit more appropriate for beginners. While the interface may seem a bit clumsy at the first glance, PHP Designer hides numerous customization options, including eight different themes and a layout manager.

Of course, it takes days to discover all features bundled into PHP Designer, but one thing's for sure: this is one of the most advanced applications of its kind. What’s more, it offers one of the most robust sets of features at this moment and doesn't affect computer performance at all.