Any review of PHP editors for Ubuntu without including GEdit is incomplete, the default text editor for the Gnome desktop in Ubuntu at first is very bare but with the installation of the the plug-ins provides a good editor that may lack some features but for sheer raw speed has few equals.

Standard Plugins

• Bracket Completion: Automatically create the closing bracket once one is inserted.
• Character Map: Insert easily all those special characters.
• File Browser Pane: Display the file structure in a handy side pane.
• Indent Lines: Easy indent or unindent lines.
• Modelines: Emacs, Kate and Vim-style modelines support for gedit.
• Smart Spaces: Forget you’re not using tabulations.
• Snippets: Insert common code fragments with a couple of key strokes.
• Tag list: Provides a method to easily insert into a document commonly used tags/strings without having to type them.

Non Standard Plugins

• Class Browser: This is an essential plugin for easy navigating classes listing the functions in the side panel. Uses ctags (exuberant-ctags) which need to be installed via synaptic or sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags.

So as you can see from the list of plugins above GEdit is not a typical editor there are some features that it lacks such as auto-completion and code folding. Although these are not present it does have some features that are not present in some of the editors reviewed such as snippets these make coding much easier and more productive (Update Jun 2 2007)but unlike Komodo Edit 4.1 these are via key strokes and are very handy. As Jeff Griffiths and Troy Topnik both from Active State have kindly pointed out these are available in Komodo Edit using the triggers.

Over all this is an excellent editor its lightweight nature is very easy to use and if some more plugins were created for code folding and auto-completion would prove more useful.

Other Reviews

• gPHPEdit
• Scribes
• Komodo Edit 4.0