Downgrade to Zend Studio for Eclipse

I loaded the Zend Studio for Eclipse and worked within it for about a week. That was as long as I needed to know that I had to switch back to the stand-alone 5.5 version.

I found at least as many of the same issues with the software as Eran Galperin did. I experienced the issues with the build and had to kill the task several times. And I too hate the “dreaded queue.”

Futhermore, I was disappointed in many other seemingly small changes in usability. For example,

• in Zend Studio 5.5 you can simply hit Ctrl + Tab to browse through your open files, as in Windows programs like Word or Photoshop. In Zend Studio for Eclipse, I have to hit Ctrl + F6 to browse through my open files, which necessitates the removal of my right hand from the home keys and just seems somewhat of an awkward key combination.
• In Zend Studio 5.5, you could hold down the Ctrl key and hit Enter when you want to insert a <br> tag at the end of your HTML code. This just seemed to disappear in Zend Studio for Eclipse.
• Adding a remote server to the project took me into some kind of file reading loop that would never finish. So, to combat the bug, I just stopped adding the remote folders to the project. However, this caused much of the code assist to “not know” about classes and variables, since it apparently must be added to the project for the inflection to work.

A bit nit picky you might say, but these small changes add up to a lot of minutes in a 10 hour day of programming and reduced my efficiency by enough of a margin to have me wanting to go back to 5.5. I really wanted the new version to work well, but it seems really buggy and cumbersome. So I switched back and am flying through code again!

Hopefully these issues will be resolved by the next release, but it makes me wonder how much the integration into Eclipse has limited or will limit the program’s usability. The standalone version seemed like a better route to me if they just took the advice of my previous post and then continued making updates and improvements.