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Mehdi Aoussiad
Mehdi Aoussiad

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4 Powerful IDEs That Nobody Is Talking About

As a developer, you will definitely have a lot of projects to work on, different issues, a lot of files to handle, and you will also have to check everything at once on a daily basis in some situations. It might seem to be complicated and takes a lot of time. Fortunately, there are many tools on the web that make the development process much easier for developers. The most useful tool for these situations is an integrated development environment (IDE) which has a lot of features that you can benefit from if you’re working on projects.

In this article, we will give a list of some extremely useful and powerful IDEs that you probably need to use even though they are not that very popular like VScode and other IDEs. So, let’s get right into it.

CodeLobster

CodeLobster is a free cross-platform IDE for PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It supports many interface languages and has a lot of features. It is created for learners and also professional developers in order to give them smart tools to make the development process much easier for them.

The great thing about CodeLobster is that it has plug-ins for Drupal CMS, Joomla CMS, Magento CMS, Smarty template engine, Twig template engine, JQuery library, AngularJS, BackboneJS, Laravel, MeteorJS, Phalcon, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Symfony, VueJS, Yii and WordPress. I would definitely recommend this IDE, especially if you work with a little bit of PHP and JavaScript. It also has a lot more features that you can benefit from such as highlighting, auto-complete, a powerful PHP debugger, a SQL manager, and more.

CodeShare
CodeShare is an IDE that allows you to share code in real-time with developers and speak to others through a video chat. It’s a good online code editor for interviews, troubleshooting, teaching, and more.
I think it’s mainly used for companies during remote interviews and teams that work together.

TextMate
TextMate is a customizable macOS text editor with support for a huge list of programming languages. It seems like a simple editor at first, but it actually has quite a bit of functionality crammed into a small package.
It’s a good tool if you have a Mac and need support for all languages. It comes offered as a free download, but you can also decide to upgrade to the premium version.

Brackets
Brackets is a text editor that comes from the folks at Adobe, in an attempt to offer a more modern, open-source solution for developers creating websites.
It is a free text editor, with some appealing visual tools for previewing your work and allowing frontend developers to examine the changes. Because of its affiliation with Adobe, Brackets has somewhat of integration with Photoshop, so it can take pieces of your PSD file and generate code for your project.

These were just some great tools that need a chance in the developer's community. I have seen people underestimating tools without trying them at all. You can choose any tool from the list above and give it a try if you are interested.

Top comments (9)

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beggars profile image
Dwayne Charrington

I think these other editors are not as popular as VSCode because they are quite simply not as good as Visual Studio Code. TextMate used to be quite popular for coding and Brackets was once a promising thing too, but it feels stale.

Honestly, VSCode is unrivalled. It's such a great code editor with a plethora of plugins, you don't need to use anything else.

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neoan

I am mainly using Jetbrain's IDEs and VSCode simply can't compete. Not sure if we only compare open source IDEs, though.
We had this "deal" with new developers at my former company where they were "forced" to learn PHPStorm for two weeks, and then would get any lisence (if necessary) for any IDE of their choosing. Most of them came from VSCode, needless to say. Anyway, not one single dev asked for anything else than a PHPStorm license after that period.

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Jeremy Moore

I find that VSCode is ok for quick edits and small projects, but anything of any decent size I require a full blown IDE with all the features provided by IntelliJ / PHPStorm

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Mat Jones

Only thing I’ve noticed is that the IntelliSense support for C# powered by OmniSharp is garbage. For any other language it’s pretty great.

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Karl Heinz Marbaise

I think you misunderstand the meaning of IDE ... cause three of the four "IDE"'s you have mentioned describe them self as "...editor..." not as IDE... only CodeLobster explicitly uses the term IDE...

IDE mean (I)ntegrated (D)evelopment (E)nvironment which means a lot.

For example code completion, support for different languages including their needed tools for building if needed (JS, Python, C++, C#, Asciidoctor, Java, Rust, Go ...) Also a vital thing is a debugger ..furthermore support for refactoring which makes real development possible in relationship with the option to run your tests from your IDE...to get the TDD cycle etc. also integrated support for a database etc.

  • CodeLobster has no support for Java, Go, Rust, Ruby just to mention a few.
  • CodeShare is not an IDE it is as mentioned on the site An online code editor for interviews, troubleshooting, teaching & more…..it's also missing code completion etc. apart from that many IDE's have integrated support for code sharing...
  • Textmate mentioned itself as .. Powerful and customizable text editor with support... but running unit tests of Java, Go, Rust, Ruby?
  • Brackets mentioned iteself as A modern, open source text editor that understands web design...

Using a very good IDE means a great boost in your working because it supports so many task etc and make things easier which are within an editor more or less not possible or not even thinkable.

If start to compare those things I would say. CodeLobster needs a subscription for ca. 60 $ for a year which has very limited support for other languages etc. in comparison to other IDE's I would simply say buying an IDEA IntellIJ Ultimate License which costs in the first year 499 Euro (reduces..) and you have everything you need... including different languages etc. For private purposes I would say community edition is very good or use Eclipse or Netbeans but in a corporate environment I would say simply IDEA IntelliJ.... the ROI very easy to get.

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Tobias Nickel

before I used brackets for almost two years, than came vscode.

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tmblog

I'm very old school and use editplus. It's a very manual application.

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Ibne Nahian

Once I used to use Atom and Brackets.
But now I feel like Why care about those when I already have great options like VS , VSCode & JetBrains IDEs ? Is there any point ? Simply NO !

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aoussiadmehdi profile image
Mehdi Aoussiad • Edited

Of course, I personally prefer VScode. What I wanted to say here is that these deserve giving a try, I don't say use them for the long term.