My PHPStorm Setup

I use PHPStorm's New UI, which you can enable if you haven't already from Appearance and Behavior > New UI > Enable new UI. This refreshed interface gets rid of a lot of the fluff that cluttered up classic PHPStorm, removing buttons for tools that are rarely used and leaving you with a clean, minimal slate from which to write your best code.

For my theme, I tend to switch between Darcula (which is built in to PHPStorm) and OneDark. For video content, I tend to stick to Darcula because the colours have nice contrast.

I like JetBrains Mono font. It's clean and easily readable. I have my font size set to 22, and my line height set to 1.8. A large part of the reason for this is video creation. It makes the code easy to read whilst still being able to fit a significant chunk of code on the screen. If I didn't make videos, I'd likely bump the font down to 20.

A lot of viewers notice that my code seems to magically write itself sometimes. That's GitHub Copilot, and I can highly recommend it. For me, it strikes a nice balance between speeding up the boring parts of coding without trying to take the "me" out of the equation.

Here's a pro tip. If you work on Open Source, you can actually get Copilot for free. Now there's an incentive to start contributing!

As for plugins, I have just a few essentials that I believe boost my productivity:

• .env files support
• Cypress Support
• Laravel Idea
• Pest

I toy with other plugins now and again, but these are the 4 that are an auto-install on any new machine.

My parting advice would be to make sure you're getting most out of PHPStorm. Make sure to watch Jeffrey's excellent series on getting it all set up correctly. Use keyboard shortcuts to expedite common actions. Use the IDE where it makes sense, but understand its limitations and don't be afraid to switch to other tools for certain tasks (for example, I never use PHPStorm's terminal, but use Warp instead).

As developers, we spend 90% of our time in the IDE, so it's vital that you have it configured properly. If you like what you see in my setup, I hope this article helps you implement something similar.

Until next time!