Developer question: What tool do you use to tidy and indent your code?

Question

Hi everyone, I started with Scite years ago and am using Notepad++ for a while. Problem is the Tidy / Tidy2 plugin seems to be buggy. At least for me :)

I would like to know from you, what tidy tool you use to tidy and indent your PHP code, Javascript, HTML and CSS.

Can somebody recommend a universal tool for that? Offline.

Thanks,
Kai

Answer 1

Sublime Text with auto-indent. https://www.google.co.in/search?q=sublime+text+auto+indent

Answer 2

The reality is that, none of the editor is complete and so it is hard to use only one for all type of work.. I have started programming with Notepad++ and that time I was loving that editor because it was very light and nice sysntax highlighting. Also there is lot of plugins available to speed up the work flow.

However, since year or two I found many editor come up with great feature. For PHP - PhpDesigner, For HTML, CSS and JS - Sublime Text 3 It is crazy fast. But again none of them will gives you 100% satisfaction.

PhpDesigner has some great features for PHP Development also support HTML5 and CSS3 whic is good. But truly for HTML and CSS I prefer to work on Sublime Text 3. But don't like it for PHP it is not so good in error notification but PhpDesinger is great in that.

I was still not satisfied and eventually I tried Netbeans IDE and than I realized that it is amazing editor for developer. Supports everything in great way. Many many features available. Afterall it is Oracal software so there is no doubt in it.

But like old school :P, I still prefer to use Sublime Text 3 whenever I have to work on HTML and CSS. So I have setup my environment with multiple editors.

On my Linux I have around 5 editors and use it as per need and most of the time I keep open multiple editors so php I can open in Netbeans, CSS in Sublime etc..

That is the way I found for myself and I am much comfertabel in this way instead of keep searching for complete editor which is impossible.

Sublime indention is super cool but Netbeans provides great formating features so by hitting Alt+Shift+F things will be formated nicely. Another great feature is you can setup your preferences for formating.

BTW: according to the PhpDoc and Zend coding standards php code indention should be converted into 4 space. This is because every editor shows indention in similar way. While actual indention is depending on the editor's indention setting. See this http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/coding-standard.php-file-formatting.html

Comments

Thanks for the great, personal insight. I will give sublime text a try (again), and check out PHP Designer. Netbeans I used 10 years ago with java, never tried the IDE with php, html, js... Let's see :)

---

Can you actually use Netbeans to run entire q2a code inside?

---

Of course..  just set your project as q2a site instead individual plugin or theme.