PHP Editing and Debugging Freeware

I’m tired of using wordpad and sticking in echo and print_r statements in PHP to figure out what is going on, so here is a search for a good debugging environment for PHP. I spent hours tonight trying to get the debugger to work. Let’s just say the freeware stuff is much less advanced than even sdb was during the early Unix days. Oh well:
Keith’s PHP Editors. The top hit in google. This is the place to find a good editor. It is too large a list for me.
PHP Edit. The top google hit for PHP Editing. Google is so nice in that it orders things for you by popularity. I’m giving it a try now. I spent hours trying to get this to work. I finally got singlestepping to work but only by using the latest development release 0.7.86. The “stable release” 0.6 doesn’t appear to have anything that functions properly. There is essentially no documentation on how to get this to work except for a Word document that is part of the help files. It only talks about setup. I only got the local version to work, not the version that let’s you talk with a remote web server. Also, there are strange error messages and things that make it unclear. The worst part is the windowing behavior is very strange for the output windows. So, I’m still on the search. OTOH, it has a nice help function for writing code and a helper function for filling in arguments, etc. So, it is a darn nice editor, but not a great debugger.
PHP DBG. The top hit for a PHP Debugger. I noticed it is included in PHP Edit as well. This is the backend to phpedit and also phpcoder which I also tried with little success a month or so ago. The main issue is that you have to edit the extensions directory of PHP which is something I’m not sure Tranquil Hosting will let me do. So, perhaps I’ll just have to debug locally.
Ide.php. The top google hit for PHP IDE ide.php. It is a web-based editor for quick development of server-side code. It offers a rapid prototyping environment, letting the user test and save snippets of code with minimal overhead. It doesn’t have any debugging capability built-in.

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