+1 for Sublime Text and it's not that expensive. If you're working (and making money) out of development you should invest in tools. Plus there's really brilliant plugins for it that makes it even more awesome. And works in all platforms, so if you move from linux to windows, at least you have exactly the same editor
Definitely a fan of ConTEXT. Simple and efficient and does quite a few others as well. Easily as good as Notepad++
I'm still using netbeans but it has enough problems that I've considered switching a number of times. Amazingly it's gotten worse over the past 5 years in my experience. It's buggy and you're reliant on about a billion bloated java libraries. For example, I restarted this computer this morning, and netbeans is currently locking up about 2Gb of RAM. That's a lot of memory for what's essentially a fancy text editor. Code completion and formatting is somewhere between poor and unusable. I find eclipse significantly worse, so not really a good option there. Notepad++ is a great text editor, but it falls way short when trying to manage a hundred sites and everything that comes with that. I would absolutely pay for an IDE if it worked the way I wanted it to. I might give sublime a shot after reading enough good things about it here. Ironically I actually do use dreamweaver for designing email newsletters. It still has one of the better GUI's, but no chance I would use it for actual php development, which I still see people routinely doing.
That was the only reason I stopped using netbeans. Now I use it to identify funky errors that I'm not getting useful error messages back from, and sometimes for formatting. I love this feature, don't need it often, but when I do it is always right.
I really like Netbeans / PHPStorm for all the added functionality, I've just used NotePad++ for too many years. I'd say if you are just getting started go with one of those two.
I have used Notepad ++ and Netbeans. Notepad++ is very easy tool, as it provides automatic syntax for every tag.
I have been using Atom for PHP editor and with some php plugins to auto-format the code. I recently tried Visual Studio Code (Free from microsoft) and it is quite good also.
I use sublime because it is free and many packages rae exiting for it. I heard good things about phpstorm because it has good integration of Symfony but you need to pay for it
Technically you need to pay for Sublime as well. Just because you CAN use it without paying doesn't mean you should. (By all means, I do it myself, the argument however, doesn't hold water). Sublime is not free.
Thanks for the information. I did not know that. The site says indeed 'Sublime Text may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use.'