Due to an unfortunate series of work related events I find myself writing php code.  Not only php code, but wordpress php code.  That however is the topic of a later post (as is plugins that edit core code using regex based searches)

I did the work in textmate but decided to spin up my new Netbeans 6.5 in order to test the subversion functionality.

Immediately I noticed that Netbeans picked up a tag mismatch and highlighted it nicely:

[caption id=“attachment_101” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Netbeans showing off a tag mismatch”]Netbeans showing off a tag mismatch [/caption]

This was enough to impress me and I did a quick google to find netbeans other HTML / Front-end features.

It now has a nice CSS editor that is comparable to some of the tools I fondly remember from 5 years ago.  The preview and menu driven selectors are easy to work with.  I’d rather have a better code completion like Firebug, but this effort is great to see from a Java dev tool.

[caption id=“attachment_103” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Netbeans CSS editor”]Netbeans CSS editor [/caption]