I work primarily on the back end of Ajax apps, and I love PhpED, it's hard to imagine how I got by before it. Anyway, here's just a few thoughts I've had while working with it over the past few months. I've only been using it since July, so if any of the below are already possible, please let me know, it'd be great.

1. Multiple Clipboards: Alot of times I've had to rewrite large blocks of code, and end up doing alot of copy&paste to speed things up. If I could copy two or three seperate blocks of code, all bound to different buttons (maybe ctrl+f1,f2, etc), it would speed things up and help relieve some confusion.

2. Auto closing of html tags when you type "</", similar to dreamweaver. I know ctrl+shift+c does this, but for some reason just typing the "</" seems more intuitive to me, and PhpED won't let me bind that to the auto-close feature. At least add the ability to manually add "</" to the bound keys or whatnot.

3. Javascript Debugging. This one is probably alot more complicated then the other requests, but would be the best feature you could ever include. All I want is the ability to step through the code and watch variables. I frequently have to debug javascript in Firefox using "Venkman's Javascript Debugger", which tends to be very buggy. Having this built in would rock.

4. More customization for auto-closed brackets. I love the auto-close brackets feature, however it always puts it inline with the bracket I just typed. If I could have it placed on the next line, correctly positioned with smart-tabbing, I would keep this enabled all the time.

Of course things like CSS and HTML class insight would be great, but giving the nature of the program, I don't see it as a big priority.

Check out Firebug, the Firefox plug-in.

I have that too, but I keep it disabled by default. I have 30+ plug-ins and Firebug tends to be very buggy as well.

Perhaps not that related...
I like firebug a lot as well, but it has it's issues....
I experienced some serious delays with some of the development extensions I use as well and I wanted to avoid having to enable/disable them all the time.
So I basically use 2 different firefox profiles at once now: One with my normal life plugins and one with development plugins.

Both use another theme and I used "Titlebar Tweaks" to add [DEVELOPMENT] to the dev profile.
Check out these pages:
Use Multiple Firefox Profiles at the Same Time
Create the Ultimate Firefox Web Development Profile

Yeah I agree. The multiple profiles thing is nice, especially if you use the "-no-remote" boot option. I can run FF 1.5, 2.0, and 3.0 simultaneously. At work though, all I use are the development plug-ins, and at home I have personal ones, so it doesn't benefit me all that much.

My main point was that having it built in the program itself would be great, instead of relying on 3rd party software to accomplish it. If I have problems with some AJAX code, I can debug the PHP in PhpEd, but have to switch to firefox or eclipse to debug the javascript.

I get it, I really do, but PHPEd is a PHP editor in the first place, I'd rather see that they keep on concentrating on the core business and improve that. Perhaps consider a pluggable structure so that external parties can develop a plugin or something? There is work enough left to be done on the main editor itself so splitting the team focus would be bad imho.

I think this is the key. There are a ton of things that people ask for all the time (like JS debugging), that while not at all inappropriate in PhpED, definitely cannot be done with a trivial amount of work. And as you say, the core product has--and will always have--a lot of room for improvement. We must remember that PhpED has limited development resources behind it, especially compared to something like Eclipse (which not only has a large OS community working on it, but has big companies like IBM making major contributions). There's only so much that can be done.

I think it'd make great sense for NuSphere to spend some of that limited time creating a well-documented plug-in API to let users extend the IDE, perhaps with few simplified sub-APIs for focused areas that would frequently be extended (e.g,. an API just for syntax parsing, highlighting, and navigation); the simple plug-ins might even just be PHP scripts or XML files. Then, things like support for this week's hot template system are usually within easy reach, and requests like a database designer are at least doable. I would imagine that NuSphere itself would benefit from these APIs going forward, although they may already be doing it to some extent in a not-publicly-documented fashion. <shrug>