The best free IDE’s you can use
IDE, An integrated development environment or integrated design environment or integrated debugging environment is a software application mainly designed for programmer’s convenience to increase the productivity.
A good IDE should have following things
- A source code editor
- Compiler or interpreter as per the language
- Intelligence system
- Build automation tools and a debugger
There lots of paid and free IDE’s are available according to needs, but if you don’t want to spent a penny then you can go for free and opensource one’s
The most popular and powerful free IDE’s are
Microsoft Visual Studio Expres Edition , NetBeans , Eclipse , Komodo Edit, Bluefish, , Geany, Quanta Plus , Code:: Blocks, Wikipedia has a very good comparison table for these IDE’s and you can also take a reference from Individual IDE pages from wikipedia.
If you are looking for a PHP IDE then I would personally suggest NetBeans from Sun Micro System and Komodo Edit from ActiveState.
References:
[1] Comparison of Proprietary and Free/OpenSource IDE (Integrated Development Environment )
[2] PHP IDE