Komodo Edit 4.1

Komodo Edit 4.1

product

My new favorite PHP editor.

What is it?

Komodo Edit 4.1 is a lightweight IDE with support for PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, TCL and some more. It is the free version of ActiveState’s Komodo IDE suite. As such it is missing some advanced features such as CVS/Subversion integration, Object browser, DOM browser, debugger and etc. However it does however provide basic project management, syntax highlighting, and word completion tools. I generally do not use these tools for writing basic PHP4 code which makes this editor an attractive choice for me.

Why do I like it?

There are few features in this editor that I love. One of them is the Vi mode. Yep – you got it, you can set Komodo into Vi emulation mode and work in a modal environment with all the quirky keybindings openly flaunt your über 1337 skillz!

Second feature I love is the inline error checking – also known as the squiggly line. As you type Komodo interprets your code, and underlines all the potential fuck-ups. I’m used to this behavior from Eclipse and Visual Studio but these big IDE’s seem to be overkill for my PHP needs. Quanta Plus which I used up until this point didn’t have it.

In addition, it is a multi-platform solution. ActiveState provides binaries for Windows, OSX and Linux. I’m currently running it under Kubuntu Dapper and experienced no problems with installation, configuration or normal day-to-day use.

Why I don’t like it?

Komodo Edit 4.1 is a proprietary application with a binary only release. This means that at any point ActiveState may decide to stop it’s development, end it’s life or change it to a limited trial shareware model. It is likely that at one point in the future something like that may happen – sspecially since they already have the non-free premium edition available for sale.

Also Komodo will probably never be available via apt repositories, which means that you have to hunt down dependencies yourself. When I installed it, it just worked straight out of the box – but I do not guarantee that it will run on a fresh Ubuntu install. I had this machine for a while, and installed quite a few things so it’s possible I simply picked up the required dependencies along the way.

Also, I needed to install the php4-cli package to enable the squigly-line error checking. This is not a flaw in the software itself of course. Just something that I needed to figure out on my own, because Komodo does not provide any tools for configuring this feature. It simply looks for an executable command line interpreter for a given language somewhere in the path. It is a fair assumption that there will be one, but I would much rather have some sort of configuration panel in there that could be used to tweak these settings.

Conclusion

I’m sold. I’m currently using it as my PHP editor of choice on my laptop. So far I’m very pleased with it. The Vi mode and Squigly Line are just to sweet to pass them up – even if it means using a proprietary solution. :)

My rating: 4.5 stars