My Journey was Notepad++, Eclipse, PHPStorm, Sublime Text, Atom, VSCode.
Eclipse really helped me with its Git integration and when PHP got more sophisticated I really appreciated the help the IDE gave me over Notepad++.
I switched to PHPStorm because it was way cheaper than VS but had better support than Eclipse and more up to date features that helped with PHP.
But it got heavier and heavier and the company I worked for would not buy new dev machines, so one day I switched to Sublime Text, which felt like a speedup by 100x. Also I switched from PHP to JavaScript in that time. PHP had better typing so the IDE could help much more than with JavaScript, so I didn't see much gain in using PHPStorm or WebStorm.
Then Atom came out and got updates and new modules faster than Sublime Text and since I was now mainly a JavaScript dev, it just felt right lol.
But Atom was also much slower than Sublime and the modules were often low quality. So I tried VSCode, because I read a few good things about it and it really was better. Not as fast as Sublime Text, but faster than Atom and still with bleeding edge modules and updates.
It's becoming more and more of a modular IDE, but I think their module system is rather good so I think they can keep up performance wise for a time now.
I also tried stuff like Brackets, Vim and Emacs, but they either felt too simple or they had a too steep learning curve for my taste.
Comments
My Journey was Notepad++, Eclipse, PHPStorm, Sublime Text, Atom, VSCode.
Eclipse really helped me with its Git integration and when PHP got more sophisticated I really appreciated the help the IDE gave me over Notepad++.
I switched to PHPStorm because it was way cheaper than VS but had better support than Eclipse and more up to date features that helped with PHP.
But it got heavier and heavier and the company I worked for would not buy new dev machines, so one day I switched to Sublime Text, which felt like a speedup by 100x. Also I switched from PHP to JavaScript in that time. PHP had better typing so the IDE could help much more than with JavaScript, so I didn't see much gain in using PHPStorm or WebStorm.
Then Atom came out and got updates and new modules faster than Sublime Text and since I was now mainly a JavaScript dev, it just felt right lol.
But Atom was also much slower than Sublime and the modules were often low quality. So I tried VSCode, because I read a few good things about it and it really was better. Not as fast as Sublime Text, but faster than Atom and still with bleeding edge modules and updates.
It's becoming more and more of a modular IDE, but I think their module system is rather good so I think they can keep up performance wise for a time now.
I also tried stuff like Brackets, Vim and Emacs, but they either felt too simple or they had a too steep learning curve for my taste.