I mentioned that in my post. Needing a full-fledged IDE for some baseline debugging isn't what I look for. And, like I said, doesn't "just work" in all scenarios.

Plus, you can't do inline code execution (the interactive part) if you are using xdebug for PHPUnit tests (even in PHPstorm). It's a really flawed experience, where getting it to half-work is a frequently frustrating experience.

Even the baseline REPL is flawed. PHP went again and forgot the P, so you have to figure out the correct-of-many-variant print statements and remember to put it before the code you want to run when using the 'REPL'

You should definitely try vscode. I've found it to be the easiest to set up step debugger for PHP and it's not a heavy ide like intellij

Step by step with the ability to execute arbitrary expressions in the middle of it? That's the important bit. What VSCode extensions are useful here?

Official docs are a good starting point:

https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/php#customizati...