nXhtml: an Emacs mode for web development

I'm a fan of Emacs but I've often been frustrated when using it to edit PHP files. Although the default Emacs major mode for PHP generally did an okay job with "pure" PHP files (i.e. those only containing PHP code), I would still find myself occasionally struggling against Emacs automatically insisting on mis-formatting my code. And when the files contained a mixture of PHP and HTML (commonplace in web applications), the auto-indentation could get quite deranged.

Programming is difficult enough sometimes without having your editor working against you as well - in fact for a while on Windows I even switched to using Notepad++ (which solved the problem by not having any auto-indentation at all). The problem with Emacs is two-fold: first, I felt I needed a better PHP mode than the default; and second, it needed to be able to deal with "mixed modes" (when two major modes - in this case PHP and HTML - are used in a single file).

Initially php-mode looked promising, working really nicely with pure PHP - but unfortunately the solution for handling embedded HTML (to toggle manually between PHP and HTML modes as required using the M-x html-mode/M-x php-mode sequences) didn't feel that practical to me.

However the documentation for php-mode also suggested nXhtml, which describes itself as "an Emacs mode for web development". nXhtml includes a version of php-mode along with support for mixed modes, and it does a great job of handling PHP both on its own and with embedded HTML. The automatic formatting is nicely behaved so it works for rather than against me, and the syntax highlighting also distinguishes PHP code sections from those containing HTML. In addition there are some other useful-looking features (such as tag completion) that I haven't really explored yet.

However it looks like nXhtml was the solution that I was looking for all along. It's a straightforward install: on Linux, download the nXhtml.zip file, extract the contents to e.g. $HOME/nxhtml/, then edit $HOME/.emacs to include:

(load "your-path-to/nxhtml/autostart.el")

For Windows it's even easier, you can download and install a version of Emacs bundled with nXhtml (however note that I couldn't get nXhtml to work with an existing Xemacs 21.4 Windows install).

Although I haven't worked with it extensively yet, so far I've found nXhtml a great improvement for working with my web application code and I'd recommend anyone interested in using Emacs for PHP development to also give it a try.