My editor of choice lately has been Eclipse, even though I don’t know anything about Java. The PDT project for PHP development is wonderful for keeping track of variables and functions and classes that my site/application uses, and it has just enough panels that provide information about the projects that I am working on, as well as the attributes for just about every HTML/CSS element.
Coupled with Subclipse for Subversion source control, Eclipse is my one stop shop for all things web development.
My only problem is that I know I haven’t much scratched the surface of what it can do, or how it can help to simplify my workflow. I discovered the plugin library at EasyEclipse, but only experimented with a few of them; the HTML Tidy and webDAV + FTP plugins. I know that there are keywords and shorthand commands that can be entered to cut down on the entry of raw text, but I can’t seem to find a good resource for them.
If you use and love Eclipse, post a comment and share your resources about how it improves your workflow.
UPDATE
If you love Eclipse, but want something that will easily let you add functionality like SVN, Git, or support for Ruby on Rails, check out Aptana. It’s a fantastic editor/IDE that absolutely blows DreamWeaver out of the water.
Hey, just wandered over here from web414.com and noticed that I might have something constructive to add to this post.
It sounds like you might be looking for Eclipse’s “template” functionality. I’ve used it in the Java editor and I imagine the PHP editor supports it, too.
For example, I can type “foreach” and press the autocomplete key-combo (CTRL+SPACE) and Eclipse expands the foreach template in place, saving me lots of typing.
You can define your own templates in Window->Preferences, (search for ‘template’.) The Java settings are in Java/Editor/Templates.