I’ve long been an advocate of Linux as an Operating system, I’ve been using it for many years now, starting first with Slackware, then moving on to Redhat 4.x – 6.x then onto Mandrake then Debian and finally to CentOS (a free clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux). It’s been a fun journey, but during that time, one thing that has always stopped me from fully adopting Linux on the desktop is that my favourite development tools were not available for Linux. Linux has lots of editors and tools, but editors are like old friends, once you learn the in’s and out’s of one, you don’t really want to change. And my favourite Editor is Textpad. My primary uses for an editor is for HTML/XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, Perl and PHP, and Textpad has served me pretty well on all counts. It’s replacement would have a hard act to follow. I believe I’ve now found one of it’s replacements. It is called Gphpedit and it’s almost exclusively a PHP editor. The best tool for a given task, is one that was designed specifically for that task. That is an age old UNIX adage that hasn’t changed over the years. If you don’t have to cater to 100 different programming languages, you can better handle the one language you are concentrating on. In this area, these two free tools really shine. I’ve been only just started playing with Gphpedit a few hours ago. I must say that I’m very impressed with what I’m seeing though. I’m not going to go into a summary of the benefits of Gphpedit, for that you need simply head to the site listed above yourself. Suffice it to say it does all the things you’d expect of a dedicated Integrated Development Environment.
So now I have one less reasons to boot to Windows in future. Unfortunately I’ll likely always have to have a Windows partition because I have to support it with my clients. In future however I hope to only have to boot to Windows for that purpose, (or to play Half Life2). If you don’t want to swap completely to Linux, but want to benefit from Gphpedit, then you can always dual boot with Windows, and make use of the best tools available from both Operating Systems. After all, it won’t cost you anything and Linux on the desktop has advanced to the point where it is no harder to use then Windows so you really have nothing to lose. If you want to get the easiest to use free Linux distribution, you could do worse then to try Mandrake/Mandriva. (see the link above.)
