One of the areas of WordPress that, in my opinion, is not covered by a lot of quality plugins, is developer-oriented – debugging. There are maybe two good plugins available right now, and I have recently decided to change that.
I have been working in web development for a while now, and in the last 12 years, all my work has been around WordPress. With that said, having an all-round, easy to use development web server is essential to keep things organized, to test the code and not waste time on settings new environments, and reinventing the wheel with each project.
As a primarily WordPress developer, all the code I wrote for my plugins was following old standards WordPress used (and for the most part, it still does), and that is working without namespacing of the PHP code.
I don’t make changes to my development setup very often, but this year was very important in terms of massive changes that included both hardware and software changes.
For years, I used the NetBeans for all my WordPress related development, but due to the various issues, I gave up on NetBeans earlier this year. Since March I have been using PHPStorm, and after a few months, I can say that PHPStorm will remain my main IDE for PHP/WordPress development for the foreseeable future.