I’ve just bought a PHPStorm license to look into something more robust and streamlined than Sublime Text. What attracted me the most are PHPStorm debugging capabilities and its robust class and method completion engine. I’ve been using it for just two days now and something very good and very bad did jump to my eyes already.
Debug and refactoring heaven
Refactoring, moving code around and keeping it DRY is a breeze in PHPStorm: just some strokes to extract interfaces and methods and replace variables really makes it all almost fun and across the board renaming and moving files is almost too easy.
Power hog
I’ve got 15" MacBook Pro and I can usually work for 8-9 hours in Sublime Text with MAMP and grunt running along; that number goes down to 90' using PHPStorm and using the MBP connected to the power source does not recharge it but merely delays the end; furthermore the laptop fans will work all the time raising the laptop temperature to an uncomfortable level. Not my idea of a digital nomad setup.
Among all other features this one is the one that worries me the most and the one I’ve seen reported the least so I feel it might be an important point for others as it is for me.