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For PHP devs - PHP Storm vs VSCode

Andrei Dascalu on February 05, 2020

Yes, I know how the title sounds and it's probably going to get some people riled up over other IDEs but there are some things worth mentioning: ...
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Glenn Carremans

I love PHPStorm and have been using it for years now.

Some comments about the bonuses that you list for VSCode.
7) PHPStorm has native terminal support that you can fully customise, I use ZSH in phpstorm terminal
8) PHPStorm has had ToDo list (also combined from multiple files) for years now
9) Again PHPStorm also has Rainbow Brackets
10) PHPStorm also has support for font ligatures, they even recently released their own font Jetbrains Mono

I saw you mentioned that you used GitKraken, have you used Fork) yet? I recently switched to it and am loving it so far.

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Andrei Dascalu • Edited

Hmm, had no idea that phpstorm got ligatures support in the end. I guess my main point is that it doesn't seem to justify the pricing point anymore versus the versatility and features of several free options.

EDIT: I have tried Fork but was rather disappointed at the lack of integrations. Sure, I have to pay for that in GitKraken, but Fork doesn't have them (except for Github - use it only for personal projects and BitBucket), whereas Gitkraken works with the one I need most (self-hosted Gitlab).

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Andrei Dascalu

Vscode does the same, via intelephense (not default php support) - just that refactoring names pace isn't a standalone action and it's not suggested as clearly.

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Ben Sinclair

As far as licensing goes, VSCode is "freeware", and contains tracking blobs and so on. It's not something to rely on.

Its source is MIT-licensed, though, and there's a build of that called VSCodium, which is proper free software.

Given the choice between two products that are substantially the same, where one is free software and the other licensed, proprietary software, the choice is clear to me.

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Andrej Rypo

Ligatures in monospace font are funny. I mean, we could write code in Times too.