I switched to Intellij from PhpED a few years ago for a few reasons.
- Better support. Sometimes PhpEd would rarely give updates about what they were working on or what they were doing. My subscription ran out and I was not going to take a chance on "what ifs" when Intellij had all features I needed.
- More features. There were and probably still are lots of things PhpStorm/Intellij has that PhpEd does not.
- Intellij has support for more languages and PHP was only part of the work I did and even less of it now.
- Better JavaScript support (support for lots of JS frameworks built in. Missing a library locally for JS? It tells you. Also syntax highlight and error/lint check support for TypeScript and CoffeeScript
PhpEd was nice and I'm sure it's gotten better, but it at the time, it seemed like they were always a step or two behind the PHP and HTML5 updates so you could never count on using the latest features.
One advantage PhpEd always had on Intellij is that PhpEd is native (delphi code). Thus PhpEd always started up faster and there was a little less latency when clicking on menus or something, but it's not that noticeable and Intellij performs better than other Java Apps.
Thanks for the reply! For a while there (I started using PhpEd in 2008 or so) the updates were coming fairly slowly but they have seemed to ramp up lately which has been nice (version 11 of PhpEd seems to be due out fairly soon but I'm not sure which features will be coming).
The main open source project I work with (Joomla) seems to use PhpStorm almost exclusively now that we have a free open source license we can use. I tried it briefly last year, but with the latest round of updates it seems like it'll be worth taking a closer look at again :-).
I have liked the native speed of PhpEd, but one thing that I think that has held me back from switching to another platform has been the lack of Mac support it has so maybe switching to PhpStorm will make that transition more of a possibility down the road.
- Better support. Sometimes PhpEd would rarely give updates about what they were working on or what they were doing. My subscription ran out and I was not going to take a chance on "what ifs" when Intellij had all features I needed.
- More features. There were and probably still are lots of things PhpStorm/Intellij has that PhpEd does not.
- Intellij has support for more languages and PHP was only part of the work I did and even less of it now.
- Better JavaScript support (support for lots of JS frameworks built in. Missing a library locally for JS? It tells you. Also syntax highlight and error/lint check support for TypeScript and CoffeeScript
PhpEd was nice and I'm sure it's gotten better, but it at the time, it seemed like they were always a step or two behind the PHP and HTML5 updates so you could never count on using the latest features.
One advantage PhpEd always had on Intellij is that PhpEd is native (delphi code). Thus PhpEd always started up faster and there was a little less latency when clicking on menus or something, but it's not that noticeable and Intellij performs better than other Java Apps.