drm's tweakblog

So, i thought I'd give Ubuntu a go. After running Debian unstable for a while (with pleasure, I might add), I was in for some new experience.

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IntelliJ is working on probably the best PHP IDE out there. Since I am running Debian unstable at home, here's how to install it. I think more or less the same routine would work for any other distribution, but others might elaborate on that.

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I've found bash scripting to be one of the gems I (re)discovered this year. When you're like me, you like to automate stuff. There's of course loads of scripting languages available to get it done, but frankly, using bash for lots of filesystem and/or configuration related tasks makes more sense than for example PHP or Python.

Here are some pointers to get you on track. As always feel free to ask questions.

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Eclipse PDT is bloating. I have a Intel 2.4 GHz quad core processor, 4G's of RAM running a 64bit Debian and the latest Eclipse PDT still isn't as responsive as I'd expect from state of the art software on more or less state of the art hardware. Netbeans unfortunately has the same issues.

So I was wondering, what are the alternatives? I've become quite a fan of the "UNIX principle", meaning basically that a piece of software should do one thing, and do that one thing very well, with openness to other pieces of software. What, in your honest opinion, is something that fits that goal as a PHP editor? Everything goes, but please try to elaborate

I have quite often seen people wrestle with easy problems. The trouble is, they don't really know the ins and outs of systems they work with. Very few times this was unresolvable by a bit more knowledge of how the software is used at a very basic, low level.

The most basic example of this is MySQL. Lots of people don't really learn SQL, they just get some GUI tool that does the "thinking" (mind the air-quotes) and generate all ALTER and CREATE queries for them in case of a structural change in the database. For productivity, this is fine, sure. However, if the availability of these tools is for some reason jeopardized, becoming somewhat helpless is inevitable.

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