faster/better development

[eluser]cahva[/eluser]
[quote author="Buso" date="1274327021"]
Also, which IDE. I tried netbeans 6.8 but I can't configure it well.. For example, it turns tabs into spaces, which I find uncomfortable and inefficient.[/quote]
Eh.. Just go to options and untick "Expand tabs to spaces". Thats it.

For the original questions I can warmly recommend Mercurial. I've tried them all but mercurial is the winner. I used Bazaar before but "accidently" started using Mercurial because CI developers changed from SVN->Mercurial. I first just wanted to get the latest version and update it too from time to time so I had to install mercurial. And Im glad I did The other reason why I changed using mercurial was that Netbeans has great support for it: you'll see the changes realtime when editing. Can commit,push, pull etc. straight from the IDE. It just works. Bazaar is also cool, but netbeans doesnt have support for it so Mercurial it is..

For the FTP synchronize atleast WinSCP can synchronize. I myself use Directory Opus to replace whole shitty windows explorer(I just installed Windows 7 and its still shitty ). Dopus has synchronise(not just ftp, everything). Dopus itself will improve everything if you use windows. Directory Opus was originally a filemanager for Amiga computers, which I loved(both Amiga and Dopus ) and when it came to windows I started using it immediately as it gives the same freedom and usability as it did back in the Amiga days.

For the debugging part.. Well a good IDE like Netbeans will inform of typing errors in code, but for the actual debug I still use var_dump, print_r and CI's profiler. I have XDebug installed on my localhost but havent used it for its whole potential. Oh, and ofcourse you can use FirePHP, which enables you to output debug information straight to Firebug console.