As I discussed earlier, I’ve been playing around some with NetBeans 6.5 for PHP IDE. While overall I have liked it a lot, one thing that was holding me back was that it did not seem to be possible to simply open a file for editing unless it was part of a defined project.
I figured it must just be my ignorance, so today I did a little googling and found out that there is a “Favorites” window you can open and use that for “random file access.” To access it, either select the “Window” menu item and then “Favorites” in the drow-down menu, or just type Ctrl+3. This adds the Favorites window in the left pane (at least in my NetBeans configuration).