Saying Goodbye to Crane

It’s been over a year now since I last had time to work on Crane properly, and it currently doesn’t run on the latest version of VS Code due to an issue with the version of Node that it uses.

Crane was a lot of firsts for me. It was my first VS Code plugin, and one of the early plugins using the client-server Language Server Protocol. It was my first project using Typescript. It was my first time having a project used by more than a handful of people.

Crane was the first PHP code-completion plugin for VS Code.

But all things must end and it’s time to say goodbye. I haven’t had the time (or need) to maintain this plugin for over a year. I created Crane for myself because the development experience for PHP in VS Code wasn’t very good, but over the last 2 years I’ve changed job and no-longer write PHP day-to-day.

The plugin has been unpublished from the VS Code marketplace so it can no longer be installed, and I’ve archived the repository to prevent any further bug reports or commits being created.

Thank you to everyone who installed Crane since I started working on it over 3 years ago. Having almost a quarter of a million people install the Crane plugin is beyond my wildest dreams for the project. Many of you filed useful bug reports and contributed code or documentation to the project. Thank you for that.

And a final special thank you to @ichiriac for creating the php-parser library that made Crane possible.

If you’re looking for an alternative PHP plugin, I suggest using PHP Intelephense (it’s what I use now).

It’s been wild. ~Joe (nevada_scout)


Final Crane Stats

Statistic Quantity
Unique Installs 247,898
Total Downloads 383,761
Commits >380
Releases 16
GitHub Issues Created 349
GitHub Issues Closed 210
GitHub Pull Requests 51
GitHub Stars 237
GitHub Forks 26
Reviews 52
Avg. Rating 4.2 of 5 stars
Release Date March 9th, 2016