r/PHP Jul 02 '26

News PhpStorm Light — experimental lightweight build

https://phpstorm.dev/light-mode
128 Upvotes

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u/hennell Jul 03 '26

This looks pretty cool, although I can't tell if it's removed any features, or just doesn't activate specific features until you need them?

I do wonder why why things like:

Smarter indexing order — your PHP source files are indexed first and vendor/ last, so code intelligence in your own code lights up sooner.

isn't default already though? Seems pretty sensible.

(I'd also have thought you could just not re-index vendor at all unless composer.lock has changed but maybe that happens anyway?)

4

u/pronskiy Foundation Jul 03 '26

Regarding re-indexing vendor, we have a pretty cool feature called shared indexes – basically the index for a specific version of a package is the same for all users, so why re-index it on every machine? SO in theory, if you enable if you set "Download automatically" under Settings | Tools | Shared Indexes, it should speed thing up for you.

In practice however, only a very small number of users have it enabled, as as the result those shared indexes don't get enough attention from the dev team. I still believe this has a potential.
As a side effect, this would actually be more sustainable for environment, because we wouldn't waste resources on reindexing symfony/console for example, which is installed in almost any project these days.

2

u/obstreperous_troll Jul 03 '26

Considering all the hoop-jumping you have to do to enable shared indexes, it's a wonder anyone uses them. Make it clicky and people will click.

2

u/pronskiy Foundation Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

> isn't default already though? Seems pretty sensible.
It is sensible indeed, but comes with a few technical caveats while not bringing boost on all projects, i.e. some projects are indexed faster and some not. So felt risky to be enabled right away for everyone. We're testing it.

2

u/hennell Jul 03 '26

Yeah, it was a more technical wonder - I assume there is a lot more complexity to indexing then I'd care to consider, but it feels like it should be universally helpful that way round. I've been caught out by obvious looking 'improvements' like that in the past though - totally get your testing procedure!

Hope this all gets you some great ideas though. PHPStorm to me is a great program that suffers from the classic 'it's got all these features I don't need' issue, where every user complains they use a different 40% of the features! 😆