windows

Ack is a recursive grep-replacement Perl script that you can download from: http://betterthangrep.com It is somewhat similar to "egrep", but is much smarter and has ten times nicer output format. It also automatically ignores annoying .svn files and you can teach it different file types.

If you are a Drupal developer you need to put the following line in your /etc/profile:

export ACK_OPTIONS=--type-set=php=.php,.module,.inc,.install

After which you can enjoy yourself some:

ack --php "check_plain"

I am always on the lookout for good IDEs, including the ones for PHP. There are several decent ones on the market. From the open-source ones, Eclipse with PDT does a decent job, for local development, if you do not mind extra weight of a JDK-based IDE. It has some other issues as well (poor support of on-the-server development via SFTP and forcing the use of pre-configured projects are a few), but Eclipse is not what we'd like to discuss in this post, today.

Today I stumbled upon a new (for me) Windows-based, PHP IDE: EngInSite PHP IDE and I was, quite frankly, blown away! EngInSite is, quite simply, the best PHP IDE on a Windows platform. I have been playing around with it for a couple hours now and I have to yet find a feature I would like that it does not have. It's a very rare example of a perfect tool.

Few important features from the long list of this IDE's capabilities: