Can’t Live Without WPIDE

I usually don’t write reviews, but I had to praise the WPIDE development team for a great product and share my satisfaction with this neat little plugin. It really completes the WordPress ecosystem!

This plugin saved me from coding in Vim over PuTTY for a small project on a budget-tier server where tunneling with VS Code wasn’t an option. The interface is clean, easy to learn, and simple. All of the basic features you want in a text editor with syntax highlighting are present. There are even a few other neat tools to go along with it. It has been my go-to for a simple plugin development project!

The stack trace that replaces the default WordPress error page is extremely useful for debugging when new code crashes your site, it is very easy to read and the problem is immediately clear. I saved so much time when I started relying on this instead of tail-ing the WordPress log! There is a recovery option, but I haven’t been brave enough to use it, opting instead to fix things in these rare cases over SSH.

This is already the best IDE tool available on WordPress, I can hardly suggest that it needs to be better. However, there are a few features/improvements that I would love to see in the future if the developers are inclined, maybe for the premium tier:

• Diff highlighting: Since WPIDE already has undo/redo as well as recovery capabilities, it must have an internal version tracker somewhere. It would be very helpful to be able to be able to commit and name some versions myself explicitly (like git) and toggle a line-by-line “diff” view in the Code Editor GUI with green and red highlighting. The “Quick Diff Viewer” feature in Premium is almost exactly that, but currently only compares with an autosave.
• Disable suggestion sidebar: The right sidebar that opens with suggestions and documentation can be annoying, and there’s currently no way to disable it. It would be nice if it prompted me with a notification icon on a button in the toolbar and let me choose whether to open it, rather than opening all on its own. When I’m working on a small monitor with limited screen space, I find myself having to constantly close it since it opens automatically.
• Relax autocomplete: The auto-complete options should also appear less often. Often they overwrite one of my personal functions or variable names with an unrelated WordPress action name. It would be perfect if they were triggered by pressing “tab” on the keyboard like in most IDE’s.
• Side-by-side editor tabs: The ability to view two files at once in the same browser widow would be a nice convenience.
• Templates: The basic parts of WordPress plugins are very standardized, so being able to generate e.g., a new “README” file would save time.
• Find in folder: If I forget where I defined, for example, a particular function, it would be great to be able to search for all occurrences of it in my plugin folder without opening every file and searching inside of them individually.

I just want to say again how pleased I am with WPIDE and the team’s great work, and I recommend it to anyone looking to do simple development work on WordPress. 10 out of 5 stars!