Having reviewed the responses so far to the What is your WordPress development environment? question I decided to list the tools that I don’t use in my development environment.
I might even give reasons for not using them.
List updated August 2015, then again Feb 201, and again Aug 2016
Tools I used to use
Object REXX
When I changed development machines I did not reinstall all the tools I was previously using. I no longer have Object REXX installed. Which means I no longer have my super grepping tool; I’m slowly rewriting it in PHP.
Browsers
I haven’t yet reinstalled Safari and Opera.
Version Control
- Mercurial
I have, but don’t use
- Cygwin – except for tail and grep
- Dropbox
- Skype
- Any form of cloud backup except what my iPhone uses
I’m considering using
- PhpStorm v10, primarily for PHP debugging
I need a better solution for
- Minifying jQuery and CSS
- Creating localized versions of my plugins
- Regression testing
- Parsing code to produce dynamic documentation
- Creating templates for custom post types
I’ve never used
- A packaged WAMP installation.
- Text editors: Coda 2, VI(m), Sublime Text 3, notepad++
- A Mac – though I do suffer my iPhone and now my iPad
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Grunt
- Vagrant
- Tools I’d never heard of until Feb 2014: compass, livereload, measureelt, bootstrap, sketch
Not used since I left IBM
- Linux on a laptop
- A virtual machine
- SCP
Changes since August 2016 ( to Feb 2016 )
- I tried Zend PHP server very briefly when I was trying to get Xdebug to work
- My development machine now has a Laravel 5.2 development, which means I also have node.js, bower, angular.js, SaSS ( Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets ) and other stuff I thought I could avoid.
- I’ve had to reinstall Putty and Pageant in order to use SSH
- I now use BitBucket with SourceSafe
- I use WP-CLI very rarely; I have a similar solution with oik-batch. I have a long term plan to convert my oik-batch code to WP-CLI… if it makes sense to do so.
- I believe that certain parts of Symfony (finally corrected the spelling) are needed by Laravel
Changes since Feb 2016 ( to Aug 2016 )
- I do have Firefox installed
- I have a working PHPUnit solution
- I appear to have a working PHP debugging solution using Xdebug and PhpStorm 10.2
- I’m very much into doing things with Git; raising Issues for just about every change I make
- I can even do pull requests
- I use SSH and Git to manage the source of WP-a2z.org
- I’m slowly accepting WP-cli
- I’ve stopped using Laravel
Things that haven’t changed much
- I’ve stopped using Laravel
- I’m still very wary of Composer, npm
- I can’t Grunt
- I don’t know how to SASS
- I tried installing Vagrant but fell at too many hurdles
- One day soon I’ll be trying React JS
- And then I’ll revisit the REST API
- I intend to try using Codeception, Travis CI