From the course: PHP: Choosing a PHP Editor

NetBeans potential drawbacks - PHP Tutorial

From the course: PHP: Choosing a PHP Editor

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NetBeans potential drawbacks

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- [Instructor] NetBeans is a very popular IDE for PHP development, and for good reason. However, in the interest of balance, we're going to look at a few of the potential drawbacks. Bear in mind when we look at drawbacks that these are fairly subjective and what bothers one developer may not be an issue for another. It's great to have an integrated terminal in an IDE and NetBean supports this feature. However, on windows Cygwin is needed for the terminal to work. So, for example, if I was to try and open this current file in a terminal, you can see I get this error message here saying local terminal requires Cygwin, please install. Okay, so be aware of this if you're working on windows that you will need to install Cygwin in order for the integrated terminal to work. Another potential drawback is the intrusive code hints. So, for example, if I was to type require you can see the screen becomes quite cluttered with supposedly helpful suggestions. Now, this can be a real distraction because the thing I'm trying to type here I can just see between these two boxes with my two tiny little characters there. Okay. So this is a feature which you may wish to turn off. And the way you do this, is you go into tools you go into options, you go to code completion and here you have those selections for turning off pop-up completion windows, documentation windows and various other features here that you may wish to toggle. Another potential issue is an ongoing bug with the NetBeans connector for Chrome. So I have my project set to run using Chrome with a NetBeans connector, which is a plugin for Chrome. So when I run my project, you can see that I get this error message here browser refused to debug this tab. Now you can actually ignore this error and everything works pretty nicely anyway. So if you update your PHP, the changes will be reflected live in your browser, which is very helpful. However, that error message can be a little bit disconcerting, and it's been around for a couple of years and it has not yet been fixed. So that is one potential downside if those kinds of things bug you. So there's just three things that I find a bit annoying about NetBeans. None are particularly serious, but they may be worth taking into account when deciding if this is the right IDE for you.

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