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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T20:00:17+00:00

I’m going to be doing some PHP editing for my job this summer, and

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I’m going to be doing some PHP editing for my job this summer, and am looking for an effective Emacs setup for editing it. I’m already heavily invested in Emacs, so switching to another editor is not worthwhile.

Right now, I have nXhtml-mode, which provides a PHP mode with syntax highlighting (there are at least three different ones in the wild) as well as MuMaMo for editing PHP embedded in HTML. I just started using Auto-Complete and Anything for programming and general Emacs stuff, respectively.

What I’m really looking for is an effective way to get Emacs to really understand the project, beyond just highlighting. Etags looks like a good option, but it looks like the process for generating new tags is kind of arduous and manual (or at least not invisible). The nice thing about Etags is that they integrate well with Anything and Auto-Complete. Other potential options are gtags (though I’m hesitant to install non-elisp files, just for the complexity), vtags, or Semantic, which I’ve messed with before and seems complicated to set up, plus it doesn’t look like it has support for PHP.

Another option is Imenu, but it only works for the current buffer, and I would like to be able to jump to function definitions in other files (preferably using Anything for completion of the name).

The projects I will be working on are not that big (about 30,000 lines total), so the overhead of Etags probably won’t be that big of an issue, but I’d rather not use it if there is a better solution.

So what is your preferred PHP editing system?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In addition to features you are already familiar with, I suggest you the followings.

    ETags

    I do not use ETags, but there is a question already on SO How to programmatically create/update a TAGS file with emacs. No good answer was posted, though, but it may be a good entry point to get an idea.

    Debugging

    Flymake is a mode to get on the fly syntax checking. It has support for PHP as well. It hints at syntax errors immediately as you type. The Flymake version shipped with Emacs 23 contains PHP support. If you have previous version, check Sacha Chua’s post on Emacs and PHP: On-the-fly syntax checking with Flymake.

    Another useful package is Geben that allows you to debug your scripts interactively. For PHP, you can use XDebug. There is a detailed tutorial on how to do that, see Debug php in emacs with geben.

    Documentation lookup

    PHP Mode has a nice feature to lookup the function’s definition in PHP’s manual in your web browser (M-x php-search-documentation or C-c C-f). You can combine it with Emacs-W3M to get the relevant manual page without leaving Emacs.

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