How to develop a site in php in NetBeans more competently?

Question

IDE

All my conscious programmer life I worked in notepad ++ and did not know troubles. But, it got hot for me to try to work in some good IDE. I installed NetBeans and immediately ran into a problem: I don’t know how to work with a specific project more competently in it.
Now I have all the sites hanging on VPS and I do all the development in notepad ++ with direct editing via ftp: I opened the necessary file in the ftp panel, edited it, ctrl + s, reloaded the page and saw the result. It's more comfortable for me. If you need a dev version of the site, I create a copy of the project on vps and work with it in the same way.
Actually, 2 questions:
1) How to do the same in NetBeans?
2) Maybe there is a better scheme? I don't really want to put denwer on my home PC.