Well, I been a programmer for many years and have tryed thousands of different editor’s and IDE’s in the past. I know some people love Notepad for windows and don’t get me wrong if it’s just a quick file change and I have ssh access to the server then I’ll use nano or vim in a second. But for true development of a serious Project a real editor is required. Now when I was using Windows as my OS, I became fond of PHP Expert Editor by Anchord it had alot of nice features that I used. But now that I moved to Linux and found that my previous editor was for Windows only, The search began again. Now I tryed Bluefish, Scream, JEdit, GEdit-PHP and a thosuand other editors until I found Komodo EDIT. Which is there free editor that has reduced functions but is still very usable for most people.

Useful Key Bindings

The Key bindings are awesome and I HIGHLY suggest printing out that page and keeping it handy until you learn the one’s you’ll use most often. Some of the my favorite keybindings are

• CTRL-A –> Selects Everything in Current Window
• CTRL-S –> Saves Document, Even if it is a Remote Document It will still save it via FTP!
• CTRL-H –> Your normal Find and Replace Key
• CTRL-SHFT-N –> Creates new Document Default type
• CTRL-] –> Jump to Matching Brace
• CTRL-SHFT-] –> Select to Matching Brace
• CTRL-F1 –> Will Automaticly Google Search Selected Words, So Highlight a Function first

There are many more you might find useful but those are the ones I use multiple times a document.

Real-time Syntax Checking

How many times have you uploaded a php file to your server and forgot to add that damned semicolon to the end of the line, Or some other stupid Syntax error? With this editor it actually checks’ your Syntax in Real time as you type and when it finds a error it simply Underlines the problem. Then when you highlight over the line it tell’s you the problem. Now this also works for any Programming Language but for me I mostly use it for HTML,CSS and PHP and that feature alone makes this the best editor I’ve ever used honestly. If you forget to add a argument to a function it will catch that too and in general any compiling errors will be found before you have time to FTP anyway. This has saved me more time then any other feature all in all.

Search through entire Directories

When working with web applications such as vBulletin or SubDreamer, things you did not write and have thousands of lines of code hidden in hundreds of files It can be a real challenge to find a function or whatever in there file structure. Today I needed to find a simple function in SubDreamer that they used to create a select box menu of the Catagory’s so that I could modify it slightly for use in a custom plugin I made for a client’s website. In my toolbar in Komodo IDE i noticed it had a nice Search function where you could enter some Text and enter a directory. So I typed function Foo in the Search field and the directory where my Subdreamer was located and hit Search. Within 5 seconds, Komodo had opened and Searched 750 files and found exactly where this was located at and just by clicking on the Search Results it opened the file and Scrolled directly to the function! That is true Power IMHO.

Simple Project Management

Once again, when working with large applications, I find it easyer to create a project file of them so you can browse the files/code easyer. To do this in Komodo you pretty much just create a new file and I personally just save it in the directory that my project is located in. It will then import every file and directory from there into your new project. How much easyer can that be!

Extensions

After browsing the ActiveState forums, I found that you can even get Extensions 1 of which I found fairly useful, 1 is a To Do List which basicly searchs your project files for a special comment that has TODO features, It then shows them in a special tab and by clicking on them brings you to that spot in the document. But there are many to pick from.

Color Schemes

Yes every editor out there has color schemes, but I’ve found one that I can’t live without after using it for the last month. You can get it from here.
His site explains how to install it in Windows, But Ubuntu is slightly different. Basicly, Download his file, Unzip it to your Desktop and Rename it to Remove it to Charcoal_Rainbow.ksf then Open Terminal
Change yourusername with Your ubuntu Username obviously and this will put the file where it goes.

  sudo  cp /home/yourusername/Desktop/Charcoal_Rainbow.ksf /opt/Komodo-Edit-4.1/lib/support/schemes/

Now Restart Komodo Edit and Your new Scheme will be there, I also suggest adding the Font as it is worth it.

Well, Hopefully this touched on some of the reasons I feel Komodo Edit/IDE is a execellent Editor and will fit the bill for any programming you will ever do.