Over the years I've tried many different code editors and IDE's. From lightweight editors like
Sublime Text and
Atom to full-blown IDE's like
PhpStorm and
Nova. However, for the last few years, I've been using
Visual Studio Code (or VS Code).
VS Code became my IDE of choice as it offered the lightweight flexibility of a code editor but still supported many of the more advanced features you'd expect to find in an IDE without becoming too slow or bloated. It's also supported by a massive community of extension and theme authors, making it easy to configure how you like. These days you can run VS Code in the cloud with
GitHub Codespaces or run quick experiments in your browser via
vscode.dev.
There are loads of extensions and themes I could mention but some extensions worth checking out are
One Dark Pro,
PHP Intelephense,
Vetur, and
vscode-icons.