Which tool for Laravel?

Question

I'm a newbie PHP developer now casting an eye at frameworks, especially at Laravel 4 since from what I've heard it's one of the fastest to learn and most elegant ones. However, what's still not so clear to me is how, i.e. in which tool/IDE to actually code Laravel projects? Does Laravel include its own or recommend any specific IDE or can (and should) I just continue to use the one I'm already familiar with, which in my case is Netbeans (which provides no native support for Laravel 4 but according plugins, besides many nice features like code completion, integrated Xdebug, versioning...)?

Thanks!

Solution

As has been said already, Laravel doesn't require any special tools to use, so any good text editor or IDE will work for you and it's a matter of personal preference. IMHO, PHPStorm is generally a joy to use, and with the Laravel IDE Helper you get autocompletion with the Laravel facades, which can save you a lot of digging in the docs. There's also a Blade syntax highlighter plugin, though that doesn't provide autocomplete. PHPStorm 8 natively supports Blade.

The IDE helper will also work with Netbeans.

Laravel is great at providing everything you need out of the box, and for some projects it provides far more than you need. If you want to keep your project as lightweight as possible and don't mind choosing your own plugins, you could try Aura instead.