Eclipse PHP Development Tools vs Kate

Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) provides a PHP IDE framework for Eclipse, for developing PHP web applications and extending PHP capabilities through the Web Tools Project. Its editing tools include syntax highlighting and validation, content assistance, navigation, formatting, refactoring, and code templates. PDT lists debugging and profiling with Zend Debugger or Xdebug, PHPUnit support, and remote projects. The PHP Developers package is described as a starting point for PHP developers and includes PHP language support, a Git client, XML Editor, Mylyn, and Terminal. Downloads are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux in 64-bit and ARM 64-bit builds; Java must be installed. PDT can also be installed into an existing Eclipse workspace. Listed extensions include Symfony, Twig, YAML, Smarty, Emmet, and CS-Fixer. The project page lists version 8.4, dated 2025-12-10, as its latest release and labels the project Mature. PDT is free, and its site points users to a manual, forum, wiki, mailing list, and bug-submission link.

Kate is a free text editor for viewing and editing text files on Linux, macOS and Windows. It can show multiple documents in horizontally or vertically split windows, and supports multi-cursor and column editing. For code and other structured text, Kate provides syntax highlighting for over 400 languages, bracket matching and on-the-fly spell checking. Programming tools include auto-completion with argument hints, scriptable auto-indentation and Vi input mode; the editor uses the Language Server Protocol for auto-completion in many languages. Search and replace handles regular expressions, multiline searches, open files and files on disk. Listed plugins include an embedded terminal, SQL, build, GDB and Replace in Files tools. Kate can open remote files and supports Unicode and other encodings. Backups on save and swap files can help recover data after a system crash. The editor is free, and its listed plan describes it as available for Linux, Windows and macOS. Nightly packages are compiled daily, but may be unstable or incomplete and are recommended for testing.