For the last two months, I have been using a new Zend product as my default PHP editor. I haven't blogged anything about it, because until last week, it was a closed beta.

At ZendCon '07, however, the beta of Zend Studio Neon (with Neon being the beta-name) was released to the public, inviting everyone who's interested to the party. So now it's okay to blog about it, and I would like to take this opportunity to name a few things that might cause Neon to become my default editor, permanently.

1. Custom formatting
In the classic Zend Studio, you can select a piece of code and have Studio re-do the indenting of that section for you. Very handy when you've messed up your code in some way, or several CVS commits from different people have thrown the structure out of whack. In Neon, this feature works even better:

I can configure exactly how I want my code to look: where I want my spaces, where the braces should be placed, how the code needs to be indented and lots more. I can configure the formatter to follow my personal coding standards, select a piece of code and have Neon apply my standards to the selection. Brilliant!

However, Neon doesn't remember my preferences, so I have to export them whenever I make a change and import them every time I start Neon. Also, a few bits of my prefs cannot be configured, such as the way arrays should look when you divide the declaration over multiple lines. But I expect Zend to be looking into that, as several of the closed-beta testers have already mentioned it in the testers group.

2. Easy compare and CVS-integration
When Neon recognises a project to be a checkout of a CVS-module, several options are added to the navigator (the outline of files and folders on the left side of the screen). To name a few:
- Every file that has been changed is visually marked as being different from CVS. This makes it easy to find what you have changed and might be ready to be commited into CVS.
- I can update and commit from the navigator. The classic Studio had this as well, but it was useless because the following feature was missing:
- Compare! I can right-click a file and compare it to the latest version from CVS, or a specific revision, or just compare it to another file I also selected. The ability to compare makes it possible to check if the file I want to commit is ready to be commited: I can see all the changes and if I left in some junk (an echo, some commented-out code, you name it), it shows up as a difference and I can edit it while still in the compare screen. Brilliant! I'm used to the way Kompare works, and frankly that one has a better overview of the changes, but Neon makes a good second best, especially when combined with the CVS options.
- Neon acts as a complete CVS client. I can change the revision of a file, create branches, browse the history of a file, commit several files at once and more.

3. It's more than a PHP editor
Apart from writing PHP code, I do a lot of work with Javascript, XML, Webservices and such. I can open a Javascript file and it opens in a specific JS editor, complete with a preview screen which exectutes the file as if it were loaded in a browser. Or I can open a .xsd file and the XML Schema in it is shown in graphical form, complete with all kinds of functionality for altering the schema. It even shows errors I made in either type of file. Very, very nice.

4. Choose the PHP version per project
In the classic Zend Studio, I have to change the PHP version from 4 to 5 and back when working with different projects. In Neon, I can configure this in the project-specific settings, instead of editor-wide. Quite a time-saver, as it prevents me from looking surprised at my editor, wondering why it thinks a bit of code has an error when it clearly doesn't.

5. Project-wide error checking
When I open a project, Neon checks all the files, both PHP and other types, for errors. When it finds them, the erroneous file is marked as such in the navigator, and so are all the folders above it. I can easily follow the path in the navigator to find the file with the error, fix it and when saved, the mark disappears. And of course I can commit it immediately.

The downside to this is a heavier editor, though. When a project resides on a remote server, and Neon startes opening and parsing them all, my computer gets very, very slow due to the heavy traffic. In fact, Neon already is very memory-consuming and needs to be shut down if I want to open something else that's big in memory (a video player, for instance). I really hope Zend is able to do something about that.

There you have it, five things I like. There are also things I don't like: the memory Neon consumes, the multitude of 'perspectives', editors, outlines and other screens I don't really 'get' yet, the fact that even a closed project shows up in the navigator and some other minor things. But those are all little bumps in the road, and as Neon is still in beta, I'm not really worrying about it.