Quick Tip – Filtering Projects in PhpStorm

I use PhpStorm for most of my web development. It is a great IDE for PHP and WordPress. One thing that I have always found a little strange is its interface for managing projects. It is very… basic. Really, the only features it contains are grouping projects into folders and changing the icons for projects. One thing that really bothers me is that there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the order in which projects are listed. They are not listed alphabetically. And I have found no way to sort the items either manually or by name or date.

An example of projects in PhpStorm.

I may be atypical, but I would guess that developers working at an agency likely work on a large number of projects. The unordered list made it very difficult for me to find the desired project. Then, for some reason, despite being no search interface elements, I started typing and… it brought up a search box and started filtering the project results.

Filtering projects in PhpStorm.
Just start typing.

To be honest, I am unclear why PhpStorm offers folders but no other way to organize your list. However, discovering this simple trick has made this deficiency moot. Now to try out this Alfred workflow to open up projects…

https://github.com/bchatard/alfred-jetbrains

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