What tools you need for programming

Programming should be easy, once have done it for enough time to have actually witnessed all the possible mistakes - yours or others. Once you've laid down the project and estimated its growth you can safely resume your coding stuff, the part you actually like.
However, the road to productivity is hindered by small tedious tasks - such as coding skeletons, testing, debugging, assuring compatibility (cross-browser or cross-system or even cross-version). And if you find yourself working with new technologies every time then you must undergo the ordeal of installing and configuring the required software, then making sure the client maintains the same set and versions.
Oh, and when you're on a budget every penny counts.

This is where a good set of (free) tools comes handy. For our purpose XAMPP serves best. It installs and configures with default features: MySQL database Server, Apache, PHP 5.0, Python, Perl, a FTP server (FileZillaFtp) and a mail server (mercury). And some other stuff too. Installation is mostly point-and-click and you can start working right away.
One of the nicest things is that it comes with phpMyAdmin pre-installed and configured. There are some nice alternatives, but I'll get into that later on.
The default installation is quite unsafe and will only serve testing purposes. We use it for duplicating the configuration found on a Linux Server, testing everything locally and then synchronizing. Even .htaccess files work right out of the box.

This is cute, but for actually coding Notepad just won't cut it. The tool chosen for this job (from about 8 months ago) is PHP Designer 2005 - it performs nicely and quite fast. Syntax highlighting, automatic indent, autocomplete and parameter help are a must; and then there is a lot of other stuff we're not really using here.

With a proper hosts file and a hacked httpd.conf file you can develop for multiple sites and test them transparently. I'll post some examples later if someone is interested.

I'm currently looking at PHPEclipse and hopefully will be able to write a positive review. Code is getting more complex and we need a replacement for the developing tool. Just have to make sure we have enough DDRAM for the memory-hungry java...