Five Open Source Web Development IDEs, Starting With Vim

Integrated Development Environments (IDE) combine a code editing tool with other features that professional website development requires. In this article we’ll take a look at five popular open source web development IDEs that you may not be aware of.

The IDEs we’ll discuss are available for a variety of platforms including Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, Windows and even some handheld devices.

• Vim, originally designed for the Amiga system, is a modal, command-driven terminal editor. It can be customized and extended via script plug-ins, of which there are thousands available. Available for Amiga, Unix/Linux, MS-DOS and Windows, Macintosh, and various handheld platforms.

• Eclipse, originally developed as a Java IDE, is a free, open-source project ran by the Eclipse Foundation. It supports C/C++, PHP, Python, Perl and others, and is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
• Eclim is actually an effort to integrate the Eclipse IDE with the Vim editor, described above. It provides plug-ins for Eclipse and Vim, and includes support for PHP, Python, Ruby, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML and C/C++ and is available for BSD, Linux, Mac OS and Windows.
• Geany is a full-featured text editor with a few IDE features. Supported languages include C, Java, JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, Python, Perl, Ruby, Pascal and Haskell, and it’s available for BSD, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, and Windows.
• gedit/gPHPEdit is the GNOME desktop environment’s text editor, with versions also available for Mac OS and Windows. gPHPEdit is modeled on gedit, but was designed with HTML and PHP in mind–and it also supports CSS and SQL.