Highlighting Breakpoints Like in Zend Studio 5.5

Looking at the feedback we receive, it seems that lots of our long-time users feel nostalgic to the pre-Eclipse era of Zend Studio. Here is one hint how you can bring the look and feel of the latest Zend Studio a little bit closer to the one experienced with the legendary Zend Studio 5.5.

In Zend Studio 5.5 when adding a breakpoint the complete line was highlighted in pink color. In later releases of Zend Studio this was replaced by the usual way of the Eclipse Platform - a blue bullet appears in the marker area on the left side of the editor's line.

Luckily, this can be configured in the same way it was in Zend Studio 5.5, following these steps:

1. Call Window > Preferences from the main menu.
2. Navigate to the General > Editors > Text Editors > Annotations preference page.
3. Select "Breakpoints" in the list of annotation types.
4. Select the "Text as" checkbox.
5. Select "Highlighted" from the drop-down list.
6. Change the color to #FFC0CB.
7. (Optional) If you want to remove the blue bullet then deselect the "Vertical ruler" checkbox.
8. Click the OK button.

Note. You need to upgrade to the latest Zend Studio 11.0.1 Early Access build or wait for the official 11.0.1 release (due in a week) to take advantage of this hint. There was a bug in the PHP editor that prevented breakpoint highlighting in previous releases.

Coding Like a Pro

When switching to an Eclipse-based IDE like Zend Studio, some developers become annoyed by the help they are provided in the code editors. Auto closing of braces, parentheses, tags and the like is helpful for beginners and advanced developers who got used to this feature. But for those migrating from tools where they used to have the full control in the editor, this is nothing but a hurdle.

Fortunately, you can switch this off. As you may guess it is hidden in the ocean of preferences. The easiest way to find it is to enter "typing" in the filter field of the Preferences dialog.

As you can see on the above image this filtering gives you the necessary pages where you need to go and deselect the desired checkboxes for the PHP editor, the JavaScript editor and so on in order to customize your typing experience in the IDE.