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Welcome back CorePHP readers. I’ve now had a chance to explore phpStorm a little more and I’ve found a few widgets that I think you might find useful when developing your own creations, but I’ll only talk about one today.
One of the biggest widgets that I enjoy about phpStorm is the smart inspection widget that just works. The smart inspection widget appears on the right hand side of the window when you are editing a file, just beside the vertical scroll bar. It’s purpose in life is to inspect the file you are working on for html and php issues and provide suggestions for improvement as well as notify you of problems it sees before you move on to a new file. When an issue is found within the file, a short bar is shown on the inspector bar and this indicates that there is a problem in this area of the code; you can then click on this to bring you to the problem as well as find out what the problem is and how to fix it. Common colours that you will see when using this widget are red, yellow, green, grey and pink. The first two indicate the level of severity of the problem. The green indicates that all is well. Grey and pink are special – if you click on a variable in your file, it will highlight it in pink and grey. Grey indicates the first use of the variable and pink the subsequent uses of it throughout the file. This saves me so much time, hunting down variables that may be redefined in several places.
If you find this widget too difficult to please, click on it’s icon (little guy with a top hat) in the lower right hand corner allows you to change the inspection level on a per file basis. In existing files, this is a helpful feature as previous developers may not have had this tool to help them.
My time today is up. In the future, I intend to share a few more of the widgets I’ve found that are useful in phpStorm.
Mark
