I’m slowly coming around to the idea that an IDE might be useful for PHP/Symfony projects (still not convinced about other languages and frameworks) and I’m currently trying out ActiveState’s Komodo IDE 10 on Linux.
It looks great but it’s… buggy. One day in and I’m already getting frustrated with it.
- The preference file doesn’t appear to be saved until the application is closed, if the application crashes it’s not clear that your changes will be saved. This might be a safety feature, but probably not, because…
- At least some preferences don’t take effect until the application is closed. Not the ones that you’re warned about like checking remote files for changes, but other ones like ‘Allow file contents to override Tab and Indentation settings’ (which itself is unreliable since at least 2011).
- When changing preferences, there is more than one place to change: Edit / Preferences, Edit / Current File Preferences, and Project / Project Preferences (the last is not under the Edit menu).
- The cursor blinks by default (which is super annoying when you’re moving the cursor around the screen) and there isn’t an explicit option to disable it. You have to create a custom JavaScript script that executes at every file open.
- The toolbar icons are heavily styled, making their use opaque and the tooltips mandatory reading.
- It has already crashed while closing — which, per the above, I’m doing a lot.
It’s not all bad, there are some really nice features:
- Vi keybindings, so things like ‘A’ to start appending to the current line, or ‘/’ to search the current file, are really nice to someone who uses vim every day.
- I do appreciate the ability to script things
- The syntax highlighting and coloring seems more reliable (i.e. harder to confuse) than average.
- The installation to a local directory was painless, and an icon properly shows up in the applications menu (I use Mate). The default installation dir is to your home directory instead of /usr/local (which is the right thing to do for trial software, imho).
I want to like this editor, I really do, but it’s just going downhill as I work with it more. At $250 per license it’s hard to justify the expense to my boss unless I really like it.
