I use a mac because I also do quite a bit of Design work. If not for that I would be probably soon switching to linux. I'm even considering getting a cheap second hand laptop just for trying coding in linux

I just came here to write exactly the same. I pay the same for most software as someone in the US but my country average income is about half. I fear that this might be somewhat an unsolvable problem.

Because it's not cool. But not being cool doesn't mean it's not good. It's actually very good. In some contexts people will give you strange looks if you say that you code in php. If you live amongst hipsters, I guess its time to move on, if not I guess you'll be just fine with php.

And by now you'll see that you'll tend to get at least one answer for every single editor in existence. I use vim (well neovim) because I can run the exact same editor in my computer and in my server. It's hard to learn, it's kind of hard to configure, but that's not really be a problem for something I use every single day. I guess sometimes the real reasons that make a person prefer one editor over the other are silly little aesthetical or ideological, rather than pragmathic. There are a lot of good editors out there, just keep an open mind.

I recently switched to neovim as my main editor. I can find tools for everything I need. Either as core or as plugins. Syntax highlighting, linting, file finder... even managed to some extent to be able to merge the vim copy/paste with the mac global one.

Not exactly sure, but I would deeply investigate the possibility of using Meteor, mostly because how easy it is to create web, desktop and mobile versions. The realtime part is also pretty much transparent when using meteor. So: Frontend / backend: Meteor Database: Mongo (part of meteor for dev environments) Deployment: Personal preference Linode vps but probably not the easiest way to go about it.