Question
What is the best and free professional use commercial IDE to use for PHP/MySQL development today?
Answer 1
JetBrains or PhpStorm but it has a big learning curve and it is heavy.
Answer 2
Visual Studio Code seems to be the current popular choice, it loads so fast. The number of plugins available make it a great IDE for many languages, particularly PHP. Visual Studio Code can communicate directly with PHP to provide full intelligence, as well as coding standards (PHPCS) support such that you can save your work and it will format it to the relevant standards. Visual Studio Code will integrate with everything from Git, to MySQL, various build tools, SSH, and Docker, so you can switch out your PHP versions any time. On Windows 10, you can even run Visual Studio Code from the built-in Linux kernel (Windows Subsystem for Linux – WSL), so it’s as effective as coding on a native Linux machine.
Answer 3
I prefer to use Notepad++ because it is simple, free, and lite. Most importantly is I do prefer to use and manage other tool outside the IDE so it does not take all the resource.
Conclusion
That’s all depend of the needs and preferences, so you may want to test it yourself and use the one you are more comfortable with.
