Emacs vs PhpStorm

Overview

Emacs

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.2K

Votes322

PhpStorm

Stacks14.3K

Followers11.1K

Votes1.6K

Emacs vs PhpStorm: What are the differences?

Developers describe Emacs as "The extensible self-documenting text editor". GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. On the other hand, PhpStorm is detailed as "Professional IDE for PHP and Web Developers". PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

Emacs can be classified as a tool in the "Text Editor" category, while PhpStorm is grouped under "Integrated Development Environment".

Some of the features offered by Emacs are:

Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.
Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.

On the other hand, PhpStorm provides the following key features:

Smart PHP Code Editor
Code Quality Analysis
Debugging and Testing

"Vast array of extensions" is the primary reason why developers consider Emacs over the competitors, whereas "Best ide for php" was stated as the key factor in picking PhpStorm.

Lyft, 9GAG, and Typeform are some of the popular companies that use PhpStorm, whereas Emacs is used by Webedia, Flexport, and Edify. PhpStorm has a broader approval, being mentioned in 646 company stacks & 502 developers stacks; compared to Emacs, which is listed in 99 company stacks and 73 developer stacks.

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Advice on Emacs, PhpStorm

Johnny

Software Engineer at StackShare

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceon

Visual Studio Code

PhpStorm

WebStorm

When I switched to Visual Studio Code 12 months ago from PhpStorm I was in love, it was great. However after using VS Code for a year, I see myself switching back and forth between WebStorm and VS Code. The VS Code plugins are great however I notice Prettier, auto importing of components and linking to the definitions often break, and I have to restart VS Code multiple times a week and sometimes a day.

We use Ruby here so I do like that Visual Studio Code highlights that for me out of the box, with WebStorm I'd need to probably also install RubyMine and have 2 IDE's going at the same time.

Should I stick with Visual Studio Code, or switch to something else? #help

1.02M views1.02M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Emacs	PhpStorm
GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.	PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.
Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.;Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.;Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.;Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.;A large number of extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more. Many of these extensions are distributed with GNU Emacs others are available separately.	Smart PHP Code Editor;Code Quality Analysis;Debugging and Testing;HTML/CSS/JavaScript Editor;Cross-platform Experience;Support for all major PHP frameworks;VCS; SQL Editor; Unit Testing;
Statistics
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 14.3K
Followers 1.2K	Followers 11.1K
Votes 322	Votes 1.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros 65 Vast array of extensions 44 Have all you can imagine 40 Everything i need in one place 39 Portability 32 Customer config Cons 4 Hard to learn for beginners 4 So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked 1 Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux	Pros 287 Best ide for php 232 Easy to use 218 Functionality 166 Plugins 160 Code analysis Cons 14 Uses a lot of memory 10 Does not open large files 9 Slow 8 Uses Java machine 3 No way to change syntax highlight for files without ext
Integrations
No integrations available	Vagrant Google App Engine

What are some alternatives to Emacs, PhpStorm?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Emacs are:

Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.
Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.

On the other hand, PhpStorm provides the following key features:

Smart PHP Code Editor
Code Quality Analysis
Debugging and Testing

"Vast array of extensions" is the primary reason why developers consider Emacs over the competitors, whereas "Best ide for php" was stated as the key factor in picking PhpStorm.

Emacs vs PhpStorm