Improve the PHP Layer in Spacemacs

[ejmr]

Kosta H. on the emacs-php mailing list brought up the PHP layer for Spacemacs and what we could do to improve it. Personally I have never used Spacemacs, but it's growing in popularity and I think anything we could do to improve the out-of-the-box support for PHP would be effort well-spent. So this issue is for the sake of discussing what we could do in that regard, the priorities for such efforts, who wants to volunteer to do this or that, and so on.

[kostajh]

Some thoughts off the top of my head:

• Integrate https://github.com/xcwen/ac-php
  • Alternatively, company-mode configuration with ggtags/helm-gtags
• Dash set up for quick doc references
• Flycheck configured with PHPCS
• Phpunit

[ejmr]

@kostajh Great ideas, thanks!

Regarding PHPUnit, what did you have in mind? Some commands with possibly some default key-bindings to invoke PHPUnit?

[kostajh]

I've made an initial PR (https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/3943). It's not all working just yet though.

[kostajh]

@ejmr there's a package on MELPA for PHPUnit, and it's actually already part of the PHP layer -- not sure if we need to do anything here other than add some additional keymaps for Evil mode.

[ejmr]

@kostajh Thanks, I wasn't aware of that, so I'll look into the package before doing anything.

[skippednote]

Thank you guys for taking this initiative. Are there any updates on the PR coming from this thread. Although I'm not familiar with emacs-lisp I'd love to help out in anyway possible to get it in Spacemacs distribution.

[syohex]

I have updated README about 3rd party package of PHP programming. You are welcome to report us any suggestion of improving php-mode.

[wildwestrom]

I found a weird bug. When I just add the php layer, the closing tag (?>) is not detected. When I added the gtags layer, it fixed the problem.