# How do I make the most of PHPStorm?

Please tell me something less known or self discovered shortcuts which will make my development work faster.

##### Post Metadata
- Posted at: about 7 years ago
- Author title: Associate Software Engineer
- Net upvotes: 1


## Comments
### Comment 1

This question is 3 months old at time of writing, but I got pinged via email so I'm going to do my best.

PHPStorm is big. There is a lot you can do with it and it can seem overwhelming. If you're coming from another editor, like Sublime or Eclipse, there are plenty of blog posts stating why people switched and offering some tips on how to make that switch.

The first thing I recommend to do is to determine what level of reporting you want PHPStorm to do aka in the sidebars, how much of the standards that PHPStorm has set for coding PHP do you want to show up. There are errors, warnings, notices, and then there are standards. I personally turn off standards because my team doesn't code our PHP with the same standards that JetBrains wants, mostly because we are dealing with legacy code and we choose consistency over a particular standard.

Walking through tutorials on how to get setup for your codebase is always a good place to start, especially if you have an existing project on your system. PHPStorm often wants to connect to and download a project, so pay attention to select to use an existing project on your system. The downside is you'll have to configure some things, like your repository, SSH, etc. without the automatically prompted wizards.

Using PHPStorm is hard if your whole team isn't using it, as I've seen with my own team where we have devs all over the world using whatever software they want. It often leads to conflicts and automatic changes that the PHPStorm devs don't even realize they are making. For instance, we code using 4-character tabs, as opposed to 4-character spaces. PHPStorm wants to use spaces and in my experience doesn't do a good job of auto-detecting that in your code, especially if it's mixed or devs have made mistakes in their spacing in the past. So in short, what I'm getting at here is that you'll want to take the time to go through and really manually setup your project. I find that Sublime and VS Code do this automatically better, with Sublime doing it the best.

If you want some guides on making the switch to PHPStorm:

Switching from Sublime: https://chriswiegman.com/2014/05/sublime-text-phpstorm-switched/

Switching from Eclipse (actual JetBrains guide): https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/migrating-from-eclipse.html

Switching from NetBeans (actual JetBrains guide): https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/netbeans.html

Personally, I found PHPStorm to be too in-your-face and opted to stick with Sublime before going to Visual Studio Code. I prefer my editors to supplement my work rather than try and dictate it, which without doing a lot of configuration, PHPStorm feels like it's trying to tell you how to code.

##### Comment Metadata
- Posted at: almost 7 years ago
- Author title: Freelance web and software developer




## Related Product
[PhpStorm](https://www.g2.com/products/phpstorm/reviews)

## Related Category
[PHP Integrated Development Environments (IDE)](https://www.g2.com/categories/php-integrated-development-environments-ide)

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