Before posting about the issues, I will say that I generally like PHPStorm and am delighted by many of its features.
The following is a list of issues that I have discovered, in more or less the order which I found them. Some a really minor; others practically show stoppers. Some might be caused by my lack of familiarity with the product. Some have even been opening the your bug tracker. But I am submitting them now in the hope that they will help the developers.
1. Help System is hard to use. The topics are not arranged in nice logical fashion. They are jumbled together. Might be nice to read as a book, but terrible for looking things up. Using Search function gives 100's of unrelated items. You must have taken inspiration from the search tool in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. I normally flounder about, finding items which are vaguely related to what I am looking for.
Some examples of things I wanted to get help on that did not succeed:
- diff tool: says "this tool is displayed every time you …" But I still have no idea how to invoke it. I don't know what it means to do any of those things
2. Many built-in features remain unusable to me.
- SVN kind of works, but trying to use merge is a complete fiacso, giving me various inscrutable errors. TSVN "just works". Or trying to commit results in "no differences."
- built-in diff tool: see above
3. in db result pane, cannot easily view wide column contents. Workaround: copy to clipboard; paste into textedit
4. When debug session starts have to manually click to Debugger window. It defaults to Console.
5. Many keystroke assignments do not work. I have my Mac set to use standard function keys. But F9 for example does not resume the program. Instead it does mission control stuff. Sometimes adding Opt makes it work; other times not.
6. Preferences: Project Settings and IDE Settings: while this makes sense to a certain degree, for me it is a mystery where to find anytning. In my mind, to use this taxonomy, you have to first decide "project" or "ide". But there is no way to make that decison. I don't know which it is. So I just flounder through both. And know from experience that this will not improve over time. Therefore having to first decide "project" or "ide" is futile. So I just flounder.
7. After a find operation, when clicking on a found location, the window is often not position accurately, but rather a bit away from the location. Sometimes clicking a second time then positions it exactly as it should have the first time.
8. Trying to set up a bookmarklet to start debug fails. The code generates the following:
javascript:(/** @version 0.5.2 */function() {document.cookie='XDEBUG_SESSION='+'PHPSTORM'+';path=/;';document.location.reload();document.cookie='XDEBUG_SESSION='+''+';expires=Mon, 05 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT;path=/;';})()
9. In debugger, when looking at variable values, if it is a long value there is a "click to view entire value". But that overlaps the Watches window, and when you try to point at it, that part gets hidden by the Watches window. You have to make the Watches window narrow to enable clicking on that link.
10. After debugging, it is very difficult to get the debugging stopped. What I generally do is turn off "listening" and click on the red stop block until it is no longer red. Sometimes quitting the browser helps. Sometimes not. Any time I go to the development site, it starts up the debugger again.
11. When searching, it continually defaults to "Directory". I would like it to default to "last used", or at minimum to "whole project".
12. Certain files, perhaps with certain heredocs (but only send-mail-inc.php so far) behave erratically. A ticket has been opened for this.
13. Certain keystroke sequences do not work:
- ctrl-arrow to move to different tab
14. regex replacement strings \$ for literal dollar sign does not work; must use \\$. In the past various tools I have used work with either $ or \$ in the replacement string. Not sure why \\$ is felt to be the way to handle this.
15. Documentation often out-of-date. For example, http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/webhelp/project-and-ide-settings.html gives .WebIdeXX (note leading period) as the location of caches, etc. On my system, the leading period was missing and the directory was WebIde50.


