tools

So we all have our favorite development tool or, as in my case, many. I'm currently infatuated with Textmate, as are many other Mac users, and use it as my primary development environment. It's merits are many, including the light footprint, responsiveness, elegance, and plugin/bundle architecture. I'm especially a sucker for the elegance, especially when used with the Twilight theme.

There are times, however, when I need to use a more robust IDE, particularly for step through debugging. As a side note, that happens to be a great way to learn what happens during a Drupal page load. Netbeans to the rescue. I used to be an Eclipse user, but made the jump to Netbeans, which is put out by Sun, after my first look. I find it much simpler to setup and maintain, there's a dedicated PHP distribution, it's very feature rich, and just flat out works. One area where it doesn't shine, however, is aesthetics, and if I'm spending a good part of the day looking at something, I want to it look nice. You could even argue that it would make you more efficient. In any case, as a partial remedy, I took a stab at porting the Twilight Textmate theme for Netbeans and thought I'd toss it out there.

Improvements welcome!

UPDATE: I figured I'd look around to see if something similar was out there, and found this one, which might be better.