Note If you want to build a complete Mouseless Development Environment, you might be interested by this book. I can see you spitting your cereals in front of you computer. “What? A PHP IDE with Vim? Are you insane?” Am I? It’s definitely possible to make a very powerful IDE with Vim: you need to know what plugins to install and what are their purposes. The list of plugins I propose here will cover most of your needs: project management, autocompletion, PHPDoc generation, powerful search and replace tools, debugger… all these features will be at your fingertips, for free.