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I have a lot of fun using circlepad.com as an online tool, then Quick screen capture to take a photo and then insert in a website; I also create pages within circlepad and link them to websites;
Any text editor works, of course.
For larger projects, IDE are best suited if you utilize the project management tools of the IDE.
My personal preference is for Netbeans, followed by Aptana (as others mentioned). Aptana is Eclipse + several modifications that should have been in Eclipse already (such as easy FTP, SFTP, FTPS).
As long as the editor has syntax highlighting and code completion, it doesn't matter.
To everyone who is wondering "Which editor should I use?": use Netbeans - http://netbeans.org/
It is free, open source, supported on all major platforms, and has fantastic PHP syntax highlighting, code completion, and project management. It is a bit easier to understand than Aptana / Eclipse.
Awesome, thanks everyone. This is the first time I've done anything on P2PU, it's pretty reassuring seeing the responses and general helpfulness of everyone out there.
It's been awhile since I've done any coding, but I'm familiar with Notepad++, Eclipse, Dreamweaver (vaguely), and vi (just barely). Wasn't sure if there was a general consensus for a specific type of work, but I see people's preferences are just as varied as they were back when I did this on a daily basis, ha.
You could use NetBeans, which is free. I'm a big fan of PHPdesigner
If you're thinking of getting professional and want to get snappy at making changes to a site get on a Linux install (LinuxMint is a good start), familiarize yourself with working on the terminal (command line), using SSH, VIm and git.
Big learning curves on a few of those things if you have no experience, but very very valuable in my opinion.
Try the Aptana Studio 3 plugin for Eclipse.
If you are using Windows, try out Notepad ++
Or vi editor, for a lot of stuff it makes your work a lot fast. Say you want to jump to the first character of line 45. In vi, you can do that by pressing 4 keys versus using the mouse to do that. Or say you want to add a certain character to line 20 to 30, or change all the "blah#number" to "blih#number". It's just a simple regular expression away from you. Check it out, it's a lot of fun.
I use Dreamweaver. If you can get your hands on a "free" version, definitely do so! Or buy it. I think it's worth the money. There are other programs out there that people preffer.
And as a side note, I color code most of the code so that it matches with Dreamweaver. But if you don't have DW, the color coding will still help. :)
