Helpful software

[JohnW]

While reading a post here yesterday I saw Beyond Compare mentioned and I almost chimed in to say how great it is but the post had moved past that part of the discussion so I stayed out of it. Later on last night I thought about some of the different software I've accumulated and how some of it is pretty handy so I thought I'd start a thread on this subject in an area where it will get seen and hopefully help someone. Anyone interested can search these names and easily find them. I thought I'd stick to less expensive ones at least to start.

Beyond Compare:
First, I have to agree with jpf that Beyond Compare is a great piece of software with great support if you ever need it. They have demo version you can you use for 30 days and a $30 and $50 Pro version. I use the Pro version because I need all the help I can get. There is a learning curve to using it to its full capabilities but it's very customizable.

Editpad Pro:
At times I've been frustrated with Dreamweaver's lack of dedication and ease of use for php mysql so I've looked for some other editors and stumbled on Editpad Pro by Jgsoft and it's pretty cool in some of it's flexibility and customization but the company has some other tools that integrate and teach you at the same time.

Regex Buddy
One I recently added by Jgsoft is Regex Buddy and it creates regular expressions, which Beyond Compare will also use and discusses. Now, I haven't used Regex buddy much but say you want to find PHP short open tags and replace them with full opening tag which I just did. If you just search out <? and replace with <?php you'll end up with <?phpphp so that's not good so you want to replace <? when there is a space after it or when there is a return after it but not when php is after it. Here's the expression to do that

<\? -?|<?\r

and put <?php into the replace.
Well, I was obviously impressed but it can take things very far and it has a lot of tools thought in it that make testing your results easy.

Polystyle $30
I found this while exploring Nusphere PhpED which is also interesting but I haven't gone very far with it. Back to Polystyle it basically formats code to match a layout/indent system so when you get code that's all against the left margin it will reformat it in about 3 seconds and integrates into many editors easily. The "KnR-1TBS-unix-kernel" style which is what I read in the PHP manual is a ready loaded style but you can changes to it as you like.

Well, that's all for now. Anyone else have anything they find very useful? Of course the MySQL people have some free tools that are handy too.

[met00]

May I add one that I lovewhen looking at code to make sure I haven't screwed up my PHP...

Notepad++

any free text editor that comes with 46 "language" helpers ain't bad.

.:: NOTEPAD++ ::.

[ridexbuilder]

Yep, Met00, glad to see that I'm not such a dinosaur after all. A quick, un-bloated piece of software - a bit buggy when running in Linux, though.

[met00]

Hey, I only go to Notepad++ after I have screwed it up in vi and have wasted 30 or 40 minutes looking for the missing } .

[JohnW]

Well, basically I need all the help I can get so color coding and everything else I can get I'll take.

I've been using a copy of PHPeD by Nusphere because I'm past most of the learning curve but it's a paid software and I don't think I'd recommend it over some of the free IDE packs. The debugger and profile functions are pretty cool.

Netbeans and Eclipse both deserve a look and Eclipse has a strong following in some PHP groups. I set it up but haven't done much yet.

Beyond Compare is by far the software I use most.

[ridexbuilder]

Keeping with freebies, Diffuse Merge Tool is a pretty good graphical compare tool.

[laydback]

When I'm not working in a linux workstation enviroment which has the ability to integrate remote filesystems into your nautilus (Explorer) interface. A must have for me is ExpanDrive which does the same. You can connect to your server or servers via SCP and it will map it to a drive letter on your Windows Explorer. A must have for me.


ExpanDrive for Windows: Ridiculously simple SFTP drive access on your PC

[JohnW]

Expandrive does look pretty cool. Can you use a certificate to connect with instead of a password and can you use it to su to root? I use Putty with Pageant for that but I'm somewhat step and fetch with it.

[laydback]

It supports SSH key-auth, as far as su/sudo, no dice. But since it's ssh, you can disable password auth for root and use just keys. I use mod_suphp for all my sites anyways so I use separate l/p for each site.

[JohnW]

I connect to my sites using sftp and I'm running mod_suphp with separate ip for each also, but root login is dissabled and I use a wheel user that can su to root. No domains are wheel users so I have my wheel user separate wiht different software. BC3 uses sftp with keys as well as my IDE's.