Goodbye PHPStorm, hello Atom

I've been using the JetBrains IDE PHPStorm ever since I really got started in MediaWiki development in 2013. Its symbol analysis and autocomplete is fantastic, and the built-in inspections generally caught most coding issues while you were still writing the code.

But, it's also non-free software, which has always made me feel uncomfortable using it. I used to hope that they would one day make a free/libre community version, like they did with their Python IDE, PyCharm. But after five years of waiting, I think it's time to give up on that hope.

So, about a year ago I started playing with replacements. I evaluated NetBeans, Eclipse, and Atom. I quickly gave up on NetBeans and Eclipse because it took too long for me to figure out how to create a project to import my code into. Atom looked promising, but if I remember correctly, it didn't have the symbol analysis part working yet.

I gave Atom a try again two weeks ago, since it looked like the PHP 7 language server was ready (spoiler: it isn't really). I like it. Here's my intial feelings:

• The quick search bar (ctrl+t) has to re-index every time I open up Atom, which means I can't use it right away. It only searches filenames, but that's not a huge issue since now most of MediaWiki class names match the filenames.
• Everything that is .gitignore'd is excluded from the editor. This is smart but also gets in the way, when I have all MediaWiki extensions cloned to extensions/, which is gitignored'd in core.
• Theme needs more contrast, I need to create my own or look through other community ones.
• Language server regularly takes up an entire CPU when I'm not even using the editor. I don't know what it's doing - definitely not providing good symbol analysis. It really can't do anything more advanced than things that are in the same file. I'm much less concerned about this since phan tends to catch most of these errors anyways.
• The PHPCS linter plugin doesn't work. I need to spend some time understanding how it's supposed to work still, because I think I'm using it wrong.

Overall I'm pretty happy with Atom. I think there are still some glaring places where it falls short, but now I have the power to actually fix those things. I'd estimate that my productivity loss in the past two weeks has been 20%, but now it's probably closer to 10-15%. And as time goes on, I expect I'll start making productivity gains since I can customize my editor significantly more. Hooray for software freedom!