As all web developers know, you can create a page by creating a new file on your desktop, write some code using notepad and then open it in a browser. To add some programming to that page you need PHP and a server to run it ( wamp ), but you can still edit the code in notepad or any other non-rich text editor. This is the barbarian way to edit PHP or HTML or any other language used for web programming. To simplify your life, to stop wasting time doing things that you shouldn’t and get that website up faster you need an advanced web editor that will highlight your code and make suggestions. I think that Codelobster is far the best in this field and I will explain you how. 

One of the biggest problem for text editors used in web development is that there is not a single language that need to have code highlighted and to generate suggestions for. The perfect code editor should know at least HTML, CSS, PHP and javascript. Codelobster provide text highlighting and suggestion for all the languages above and it is also updated to the last versions of HTML5 and CSS3, so you can be sure that you don’t miss anything. Another part of this code highlighting is that the text editor have to take care of the interconnected files and inclusions. HTML classes have to be correlated with their definitions in the CSS file. Codelobster is doing great on this aspect too.

There is a great aspect that will make you to save a lot of time, along with the code highlighting and suggestions. PHP debugging is tricky. I remember times when I had to debug PHP codes and I had to echo everything to the screen until I figured out what I was missing. ( In most cases there was a mispelled variable name ). With codelobster you can run any PHP script step by step and you can track every variable value during the execution. If I knew about Codelobster before I would have saved thousands of hours of work.

More, codelobster comes with a SQL manager that will let you to do operations on the database directly from your editor. It also have FTP manager so any changes you make to an open document will be automatically uploaded to your server. Other notable features of codelobser are: pair highlighting, possibility of blocks selection, collapsing, tooltips, navigation on descriptions of functions and included files at withholding of the key of CTRL, viewing of structure of files and project, preview in a browser, book-marks, and all other standard possibilities for work with a code.

If you are not using codelobster already I suggest you to give it a try, and you won’t regret, because you have only advantages:

  • Write more code in less time
  • Save hundreds of hours of work on debugging
  • Arrange your code better
  • Spend more time thinking and less writing
  • Write error-free code
  • Get suggestion on how to improve your code

The best of the best is that you can get all of this for free. Despite codelobster have more and better features than any other code editor, it is absolutely free.

More, if you work on a platform or a framework, for example wordpress, joomla, codeigniter, cakephp, symphony, yii, drupal, jquery or smarty template engine, you can use a plugin for codelobster that will highlight and suggest  all the functions and features made available by your favourite platform or framework.

I love the Codelobster WordPress plugin that help me to write wordpress themes and plugins in less time with no errors. The wordpress plugin will also help you to install wordpress and to dynamically edit wordpress themes using a visual editor.