12 Plugins That Make Sublime Text 2 the Best Code Editor for PHP Development

Sublime Text 2 is a fantastic code editor but out of the box is pretty limited in PHP IDE functionality. There are many plugins available for Sublime Text 2 that make it more of an IDE and in my opinion, the best editor available for PHP development.  Here are my top 12 plugins that extend the Sublime Text 2 feature set and make it my top choice for a PHP IDE.

1: Package Control

Package Control is an amazing plugin developed by Will Bond that allows you to easily search for, install, manage, remove, and update other packages. Package Control adds a nice menu to easily manage your packages. This is by far the most important plugin as it allows you to easily add and manage the other plugins.

2: Sublime Code Intel

Sublime Code Intel adds IDE functionality to Sublime Text and adds autocomplete for available modules, symbols, functions, and methods as a true IDE should. It also adds the ability to jump to a function or method definition if it is defined outside of the current file. It also adds a snipped about the current method in the ST2 status bar.

3: Sublime Linter

Sublime Linter is an extremely handy plugin that quickly and automatically detects syntax errors in your code. In addition to the built in PHP linter, the plugin also has linters for C/C++,CoffeeScript, CSS, Git Commit Messages, Haml, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Objective-J, Perl, Puppet, Python, Ruby, and XML.

 

4: WordHighlight

Word Highlight is a great Sublime Text 2 plugin that highlights all occurances of the current string. Simply doubleclick a string and Word Highlight does the rest. The highlighted words are much quicker to see than a find operation. The plugn also adds a dot to the gutter for easy identification when scrolling or for out of view instances of the string. The color scheme is completely customizable.

5: DocBlockr

DocBlockr is an ST2 plugin that autocompletes your doc blocks, all you need to do is start the doc block with a /** and hit enter to complete it. DocBlockr also includes snippets for adding documentation to the doc block speeding up and standardizing your doc blocks.

6: Sublime Alignment

Will Bond comes to the rescue again with a simple but very useful plugin that automates the alignment of special characters in a selection. This is very useful for aligning ‘=’ characters in variable assignment or ‘=>’ characters in array definitions. This eliminates all of the wasted time spent writing clean code and makes you much more productive.

7: Sidebar Enhancements

The stock ST2 sidebar is pretty limited and does not function like the Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder withn options menu to perform tasks. Sidebar Enhancements adds operations that can be done on the sidebar file explorer items, such as deleting, copying, renaming, and many of the standard operations we would expect from a file explorer.

8: FileDiffs

Want to see what line of code changed between 2 versions of the same file? FileDiffs is a simple but powerful tool that allows you to see just the differences between 2 files. Compare files that are open, filepaths, or even the clipboard.

9: Git

Annoyed with version control command line commands or just sick switching to the command prompt solely to check out the latest updates to the repository? The Git plugin adds Git commands right into Sublime Text so you don’t need to use the command line to perform version control operations.

10: Sublime SVN

The SVN plugin adds SVN version control functionality to Sublime Text. This one has a small cost associated with it, but totally worth it if you’re a heavy SVN user.

11: Sublime SFTP

Sublime SFTP plugin allows you to quickly upload, download, or sync files using FTP or SFTP. This allows you to quickly sync remote files for those who use an FTP server. This one also has a small cost, but again very worthwhile if you use FTP often and want to save some time and energy switching between an FTP client and ST2.

12: Soda Theme

The Soda Theme package adds dark and light theme enhancements to Sublime Text. This adds more than just text colors and a background color, it also upgrades the tab styles, sidebar styles, and has retina support to update the complete look and feel of Sublime Text 2.