Hey everyone. I’ve been a Linux user since 2008, and have kept myself solidly within FOSS or GNU/Libre software for a really long time. Not to be a total walking stereotype, I am fundamentally against Microsoft for a multitude of reasons, and I wanted to see if anyone out there has moved onto something different as well. VSCode is a juggernaut in terms of what it can do for developer workflows thanks to the insane plugin community, so I know I’ll need to adjust to a new workflow to a certain degree.
I develop in Laravel and some Symfony, MariaDB and PGSQL, Vue3 and Tailwind. Testing, static analysis, and linting suites are ran on the command line, so that’s not an issue. I don’t use AI in any capacity of my life, so that’s also not a requirement. If I could find something that offers a “run this cli command on file saving”, that’s really about the biggest requirement I hope to have in place.
I tried KDevelop with PHP support, but that IDE feels very much geared towards KDE development first and foremost. I gave Netbeans a shot last year, and I couldn’t quite get my groove going after a couple weeks. Every couple of years I keep checking in on editors like Netbeans or Sublime… but I feel like I’m not aware of other options.
Suggestions are welcome. Thanks!


Thanks for this. I’m on KDE, and I have to admit that I never took the time to look into Kate for anything outside of editing random text files. So, I’ve now jumped in and will be test driving this for a few weeks to see if I can make the switch.