Last week while milling around with those gathered for the Drupal meetup sponsored by the visiting folks at Lullabot, I kept hearing a loud buzz about Komodo, a sophisticated code-editing software tool. Turns out that Komodo, which normally costs an amount of bucks I found too rich for my blood, has a free version called Komodo Edit that provides a large chunk of its commercial version's functionality.

Known in the coder's universe as an IDE, Komodo does all sorts of handy things like: auto complete code statements in any number of coding languages, provide dropdowns of code statements in your document (like template.php or page.tpl.php) for easy finding, provide different colors for statements in code languages (i.e. make HTML or CSS or PHP code orange to distinguish it), collapse code statements to hide long lines of code, etc. etc.

I've been using, and have recommended, tools like TextWrangler for the simpler of those tasks (see my previous tip about SVN software tools). I'm only 15 minutes into using Komodo Edit and I'm here to say I'll probably never look back. This will definitely make my life easier when working in Drupal's template files (template.php, page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php), especially since Komodo Edit autocompletes PHP providing end brackets and other syntax of which I'm not super-familiar (yet).

So, here are some links for those of you looking for some new helpful tools:

Komodo Edit info and download:
http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/komodo_edit.mhtml

Drupal node of other handy software tools for Drupal coding:
http://drupal.org/node/147789

Enjoy!  And let us know if you start using Komodo Edit.  I'm interested in tips and tricks and problems you find.  Add comments to this post and we can all learn together.