FOSS Project Spotlight: the Codelobster IDE—a Free PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript Editor

The Codelobster free web language editor has been available for quite some time and has attracted many fans. It allows you to edit PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, and it highlights the syntax and provides hints for tags, functions and their parameters. This editor deals with files that contain mixed content easily as well.

If you insert PHP code in your HTML template, the editor correctly highlights both HTML tags and PHP functions. The same applies to CSS and JavaScript code, which is contained in HTML files. The program also includes an auto-completion function, which greatly speeds up work for programmers and eliminates the possibility of errors.

The Codelobster IDE provides contextual help on all supported programming languages, and it uses the most up-to-date documentation, downloading it from official sites so you quickly can get a description of any HTML tag, CSS attribute, PHP or JavaScript function by pressing the F1 key.

The built-in PHP debugger allows you to execute PHP scripts step by step, sequentially moving through the lines of code. You can assign check points, view the process of the work of loops and monitor the values of all variables during the execution of a script.

You can view the HTML templates directly in the editor, highlight the interesting elements on a page and explore the associated CSS styles. The HTML and CSS inspector works by following the well known FireBug principle.

Other useful functions and features of the IDE include:

• Pair-highlighting of parentheses and tags—you'll never need to count parentheses or quotation marks; the editor takes care of it for you.
• Highlighting of blocks, selection and collapsing of code snippets, bookmarks to facilitate navigation on edited files, recognition and building of the complete structure of PHP projects—all of these functions ensure easy work with projects of any scale.
• Support for 17 user-interface languages, including English, German, Russian, Spanish, French and more.
• The program works on the following operating systems: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, macOS, Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian.

The professional version of the Codelobster IDE provides programmers with even more features.

For example, you can work with projects on a remote server with the use of the built-in FTP client. You can edit the selected files, preview the results and then synchronize the changes with the files on the hosting side.

In addition, the professional version includes an extensive set of plugins:

• Fully implemented support for JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery, Node.js, AngularJS, BackboneJS and MeteorJS.
• A large set of extensions that helps when working with PHP frameworks, such as CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Phalcon, Smarty, Symfony, Twig and Yii.
• Plugins for working with the most popular CMSes, including Drupal, Joomla, Magento and WordPress.

You can download and install any framework directly from the program without being distracted from your main tasks.

Generally speaking, I should note that during a year of work, our team had no complaints about the editor. The Codelobster IDE works fast, doesn't hang and even allows us to work with large PHP projects.

You can download the Codelobster IDE from the official website.

—Stanislav Ustimenko