Missing Features in Zend Development Environment are Efficiency Killers

I requested the addition of the following two features for Zend Studio that I believe are really killing efficency in my programming (and likely yours if you are using it!)

1. Code folding for arbitrary code blocks. While we CAN fold functions in classes, we appear unable to simply highlight arbitrary code blocks for folding. This wastes a lot of time scrolling.
2. CSS code completion support (context dropdowns).

The email I got back said that they had opened a feature request for the code folding (SWEET!), but that they already had CSS code completion and to send them a scenario that they could reproduce. Did I miss something? I certainly have not seen any CSS code completion, so this is what i sent back:

Perhaps my ZDE is not configured correctly, but I do not see the CSS code completion. For example, if I wish to style a <p> tag to be aligned center with bold text, I would start by typing the following code:

<p

As soon as I hit the space bar in Dreamweaver, a drop box appears and gives you the option to select align, class, dir, id, etc, which is actually HTML attribute support, which ZDE does provide me. However, once I select “style” I get to the point that I have the following,

<p style=””

and my cursor is placed in between the quotation marks. However, this appears to be the extent of the ZDE code completion for this tag. At this point in Dreamweaver, another drop-box appears giving me the CSS options azimuth, background, background-attachment, background-color, background-image, etc and this is the first part of the CSS attribute support I am speaking of. I must only type “te” and the text-align option is highlighted and I can then hit enter. At this point, my tag looks like this:

<p style=”text-align:”

and another drop box appears giving me the option to select center, inherit, justify, left, or right. I must now only type “c” and enter, then finish off this CSS attribute with a semicolon. Once I hit space bar, another drop box appears and I must only type “font-w” and hit enter, then “b” and enter, and I have completed the font-weight attribute:

<p style=”text-align:center; font-weight:bold;”

Now I just hit the “End” key and type “>” to close my tag and I am done.

<p style=”text-align:center; font-weight:bold;”>

To illustrate the importance of this feature in terms of efficiency, I complete this tag in Dreamweaver in 24 keystrokes, including spaces, Enter and End keys, while the same tag in ZDE costs me 43 keystrokes. To be completely fair, ZDE automatically adds the closing tag of </p> which would cost me 3 additional strokes in DW “</ + Enter”. However this still brings the score to 27 to 43, which is a rather large efficiency gap in my opinion. To be honest, though I have grown somewhat accustomed to the closing tag being automatically added in ZDE, I am not sure it is always an efficient method in itself, and it was rather frustrating when I first started using ZDE.

In any event, multiply this loss of efficiency from one tag and its CSS attributes by thousands of lines of code and I think you can see why this is a critical feature to be added to this otherwise outstanding piece of software.