A range of tools are available to make your life as a Moodle developer easier, and your development faster. These range from editor and IDE integrations, to linting tools which helps your code meet Moodle's Coding style, to build tools essential to the build process.
Every developer creates simple tools to avoid repeating cumbersome and/or boring tasks, and that is precisely why MDK has been created: to pack all those useful tools in a portable way across systems. Initially developed in Bash, the project moved to Python to avoid dealing with inconsistencies between Unix platforms, and eventually to support Windows.
Overview
PhpStorm is a commercial IDE, it is arguably the best IDE for PHP developers with features such as code completion, code inspection, phpunit support, Behat support, database editor, debugger, etc.