I've been on the receiving end of these sorts of comments before, and I cannot convey how annoying this attitude of entitlement is. Someone has worked on this theme, off-and-on, for almost a year. He's built something useful, and he's giving it away for free. If you want a feature, gpmcadam's comment is a good example to follow. Simply point out the missing feature and say how it would be nice to have.
Ideally, submit a pull request. Even if your NetBeans theme isn't perfect, it'll be a starting point for discussion.
"No autocompletion for php variables inside [SQL] strings"
Believe it our not, I still write SQL statements in my code. So writing an UPDATE on a table with 30 fields (I didn't design the tables) is hella easier in Netbeans then PHPStorm. I don't have to worry about typo's in Netbeans.
If JetBrains ever gets around to fixing this, I'll gladly switch.
It's free, for one thing. IntelliJ is still for-pay if you want Java EE features, and while few of my projects are Java EE all of them use some EE features (JSF, especially).
I tried IntelliJ community edition and was not very impressed. The time/cost of switching is pretty high. I'm not sure what the value is I'd be getting for that effort--better completion? More graphical ways of doing things?
If I had $200 to blow on an IDE I would probably do it just to try, but I haven't even found $50 for Chocolat.
I don't know about you, but "try this software you don't need so that if you like it you can pay me $200 you don't have" isn't a compelling pitch. NetBeans works fine. Blacklisting HN would do twenty times more for my productivity than a better IDE.
I use netbeans (6.9) for python and javascript (/editing html/css). I'm not ready to make an investment in something hardcore like vim. Is there anything free that's better for this? intelliJ doesn't seem to support these with the free version.