As a follow-up to my full review of Komodo 3.5 Beta I decided to update it for Komodo 3.5.1, after the help of the Komodo team to help me work out why I had some of the issues I brought up.
Installation
This time around, I had no problems installing Komodo on Linux or WinXP, I installed the license after the application as instructed and it just worked. Great 
Editing Files
JavaScript
Although I was told the ability to resolve JavaScript symbols within the current file is available through ctrl+space (after typing the start of the symbol), I was unable to get to it to work.
However, just having the object tree, code folding, syntax highlighting and error detection is a major plus.
PHP 5
In my last review, I stated that support for PHP 5 was missing, I was wrong (there, I said it! 
).
The actual problem is that Komodo isn’t able to work by default with PHP 5.1. The reason for this, is that it is designed to look for and load $installdir/lib/support/php/phpfunctips-$version.txt. Where $version is e.g. 5.0 not 5.0.x, the x is disregarded.
The simple solution to this, is to copy phpfunctips-5.0.txt to phpfunctips-5.1.txt – though it is only current with 5.0 I believe. Its much better than being stuck with 4.x 
Furthermore, and more importantly IMO, Code Completion works, the reason it did not previously, as was finally found out through a bunch of Q&A e-mail sessions with Jeff Griffiths from ActiveState, was my character set was broken. I had a Copyright symbol (©) in a UTF-8 document, and I was using the ISO-8859-1 character for it (apparently, I had copied the comment it was in, from an ISO-8859-1 document to a UTF-8 document in Zend Studio).
I found this problem out by trying to copy the contents of the file into a new file and then saving – at which point it fussed about the bad characters and requested to replace the bad characters with ‘?’.
I personally would rather have this check done on file load, and be prompted to replace the bad characters replaced with a ? or some other symbol, or to change the charset. Oddly enough I double checked the file in Zend Studio, the character is just not there, which is even worse behavior!
Conclusions
I am definately considering using Komodo for my non-PHP editing tasks, though I wish the CVS/SVN support was in the personal edition
I will never touch Eclipse again, I’m sure. The support for languages in Komodo is more than I need, and the resources footprint is far friendlier.
I would highly recommend checking this out if you’re doing more than PHP on a regular basis and haven’t yet purchased Zend Studio, Komodo 3.5.1 is now out for Linux, Windows and OS X. For those who do have Zend Studio, be sure to check it out as an editor for non-PHP tasks, though I still feel Zend Studio has the edge where PHP itself is concerned.
– Davey
