I’ve written about this before, but since the interactive mode of PHP (php -a) seems to be broken on OS X, I think it’s worth singing the praises of Jan Kneschke’s php shell project once again.

It’s a piece of cake to install the tool with the PEAR installer, and since I last used it 2 great new features are on offer:

• tab completion for all (or many) PHP functions and built-in classes and interfaces
• handling of fatal errors

What a relief to have this working again!  I was ssh-ing onto my Fedora servers just to test out code but of course this became impractical pretty quickly.  And did I mention it runs great on PHP 5.3?

And if you’re tempted to use the similarly named phpsh project from the Facebook open src stables, I can confirm this is not an option with the latest version of PHP.