So there was Zend. Which I bought. By the time I got a strong enough machine which could run Zend Studio with anything I would call even remotely acceptable speed, I no longer needed the much caveated for tooltips.

There is Komodo. Nice. And expensive. And again, not native to my Kubuntu Linux, which makes it more sluggish than I like.

I stuck with KATE which, through the kio-slaves provided by KDE can access me any remote filesystem via any protocol I can dream of. It has a rudimentary autocomplete -- it's string based which is actually good when writing menu definitons and such.

And then comes protoeditor which uses KATE (actually katepart) as its editor. The thing just works. I converted the rpm to deb with a simple alien command, installed the php5-dev and the php-pear packages, did a pecl install xdebug. First bump, xdebug is a zend extension and you need a full path, so add

to php.ini, restart Apache. In protoeditor settings, click on sites and fill out the form accordingly, if you devel on localhost, the remote and local are the same, the default file is index.php with the full local path, the debugger is PHP xdebug.

Now, I triggered a breakpoint somewhere, pressed Start Debug , then pressed the same icon again which changed into Continue and next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a running Drupal with all the variables there. So much more powerful than var_export and such! I am very happy to finally find a lightweight environment which allows me to debug. Note: the need to press Continue can be removed under Xdebug configuration, untick break on load.

It also works as a KATE plugin, under Kubuntu you need to compile from source:

1. aptitude install kdebase-dev kdelibs4-dev libx11-dev x11-dev build-essential antlr
2. untar
3. ./compile --prefix /usr --enable-kate-plugin
4. make
5. make install
6. start KATE, choose Configure Kate under Settings.
7. under Applications / Plugins you will see Kate script debugger

Using protoeditor as a KATE plugin is better because there I could collapse the various debug panels while in protoeditor I could not. If my understanding is correct, then this is the only way to use other Kate Applications Plugins under protoeditor. (The PHP browser found at the same site needs the same configure and it'll be there too.)

To debug Drupal (that's why we are here, aren't we?) into arguments just add q=drupal_path or q=drupal_path&sort=foo -- it's a normal GET string. It's so cumbersome to change that for every page... If you check global variables, you will discover a strange $_GET['XDEBUG_SESSION_START'] = "205912638" in there. Now, you can go to the Xdebug settings (in KATE/protoeditor) and enable JIT. In your browser, add ?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=205912638 and there you are, triggered debugging from your browser. How cool that is?

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