I’m a pretty happy BBEdit user. I’ve been using BBEdit for years and I’m very comfortable with it. I’ve never really felt the need for an IDE, but I’m curious and there is a new version of the Zend IDE out, so I figured I’d give the 21 day eval a try. I’m in the midst of developing new features, so this is a good time to really give it a workout.

The install was easy and it booted up just fine. Then the first thing I noticed was that the file browser window didn’t have a vertical scroll bar. Then while trying to get down to my development projects (/Users/aking/Sites/etc.) it thought I wanted to rename a folder and highlighted the name of the folder. After that it seems to have hung up on me entirely. I couldn’t Quit, so I had to Force Quit… not a good start.

After booting it up again, the File System panel has a scroll bar and I can now get to my files: much better.

More observations:

• Auto-complete is good, I’m glad I didn’t have it as a crutch when I was first learning though.
• I love having a tabbed MDI interface, I wish BBEdit had something like it.
• My standard Mac keybaord commands don’t seem to be working. Option arrow to jump by word doesn’t work, ctrl arrow seems to do that.
• I used the ‘save this workspace as a project’ option, but I get an error when trying to subsequently open the project. Maybe I’m not doing things right, but nothing seems to work the first time. 🙁
• Close file is Cmd+F4? Are you kidding me?? This is with Mac OS keyboard shortcuts enabled too. 🙄 At least it was easy to add Cmd+W in the Key Map area of the Prefs.
• During the install, I unchecked all of the ‘associate file types’ options, but I see that it has taken over all of my web files anyway. Why did it give me the option if it was just going to ignore it?
• I couldn’t get a ‘handle’ on the divider between the two side windows when I was trying to resize them. After clicking around a bit, I was finally able to. It seems like the File System window hangs things from time to time.
• When selecting a function from the inspector, it does jump to that function but it makes the function foo() line the last line on the screen. This means I have to page down every time to see the actual function.
• Standard Mac behavior for the Home and End keys are to navigate to the top or bottom of the document. In the Zend IDE, they are going to the front and end of the current line.
• The function list in the inspector pane is not as fast for navigating as BBEdit’s function drop down menu.
• I opened the Preferences but I couldn’t do click on anything, the Escape button did close the window. Quitting and re-launching will probably fix it, but still annoying.

It seems like the Mac version may not be quite ready for primetime. I’m going to read through the docs so I can test out some of the more advanced features and see how those work.