For PHP - I love PHPStorm (from jetBrains - the same company behind IntellJ).

But it's missing one important (to me) feature that's been labeled as a critical bug for 2 12 years. And never fixed:

And that's http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-2377

"No autocompletion for php variables inside [SQL] strings"

Believe it our not, I still write SQL statements in my code. So writing an UPDATE on a table with 30 fields (I didn't design the tables) is hella easier in Netbeans then PHPStorm. I don't have to worry about typo's in Netbeans.

If JetBrains ever gets around to fixing this, I'll gladly switch.

I had no idea netbeans even supported php.

It's free, for one thing. IntelliJ is still for-pay if you want Java EE features, and while few of my projects are Java EE all of them use some EE features (JSF, especially).

I tried IntelliJ community edition and was not very impressed. The time/cost of switching is pretty high. I'm not sure what the value is I'd be getting for that effort--better completion? More graphical ways of doing things?

If I had $200 to blow on an IDE I would probably do it just to try, but I haven't even found $50 for Chocolat.

The full version has a 30 day trial. I used to use Eclipse/Netbeans. I hate java and intelliJ actually makes it bearable.

I don't know about you, but "try this software you don't need so that if you like it you can pay me $200 you don't have" isn't a compelling pitch. NetBeans works fine. Blacklisting HN would do twenty times more for my productivity than a better IDE.

I use netbeans (6.9) for python and javascript (/editing html/css). I'm not ready to make an investment in something hardcore like vim. Is there anything free that's better for this? intelliJ doesn't seem to support these with the free version.

I posed my question under the guise that we were talking about Java. I don't use an IDE for JS/Python, sublime text does everything I need for them.