I can see you spitting your cereals in front of you computer. “What? A PHP IDE with Vim? Are you insane?”

Am I? It’s definitely possible to make a very powerful IDE with Vim: you need to know what plugins to install and what are their purposes.

The list of plugins I propose here will cover most of your needs: project management, autocompletion, PHPDoc generation, powerful search and replace tools, debugger… all these features will be at your fingertips, for free.

Once upon a time, PhpStorm was the IDE I loved. I thought I would use it all my life, happily without looking at any other editor.

I was wrong.

I discovered the true love of my live, called Vim.

Are you confused? Are you yelling “why” to the deaf sky? What happened between PhpStorm and me? Why a PHP developer would use this… old smelly thing called Vim?

I was happy with PhpStorm. We had a productive relationship. Its basic rules was simple, as simple as many text editor in the computing world. You use a mouse, you click where you want to change or add something, somewhere. The basic editor. We are all used to that from the beginning of times!

When PHP 7 came up with strong types, I saw the light. I had the hope not to see anymore bugs and inconsistencies due to weak typing in PHP.

I remember reading some code and having no idea what could be the type of the variables I had in front of me. Can I use the return of this method as an int? A boolean? Will it create silent bugs and unexpected behaviors?

When I search and read code about time and date problems developers have, I noticed that a lot of people still use the old PHP functions like date(), time() or strtotime().

What about using the class DateTime instead?

DateTime can do all the usual date and time operations you could ask for, and even more. Using DateTime can save a lot of time when you have to do simple, or more complex operations on dates.

PhpStorm is my favorite IDE for coding in PHP: pretty stable, you can do a lot with it. A shed load of stuff in fact. Even coding!

The guys from Jetbrains tried to integrate every useful tools for a web developer in one software and, I have to say, it is pretty well done!

You can configure easily a debugger, using a terminal, sending requests to your remote or local databases. It has a very good GUI for Git and everything you expect to find in an IDE (auto completion, indexing…).