Dbeaver is my stand alone app of choice. It’s Java based but has some nice features as well.

Your right though, the interface really wasn't too terrible. Was definitely better than what was available for Postgres even a few years later when I first had contact with that.

But then, I suppose PHP itself is good enough and the people using it never felt a need for anything new. Laravel solved the lack of application structure / design handrails, and Facebook solved or worked on the bigger issues around the language - typing and runtime performance.

Looking at the usage, I thought this syntax was interesting:

//here's how we read a key $sx->readKey('username', $username);

Is there a reason you are requiring a variable to be passed by reference to the readKey function, instead of doing:

$username = $sx->readKey('username');

EDIT: ahh, I see you have a returnKey('key') function that works that way

Sometimes ppl ask why dont just use phpMyAdmin, but most of the time I need to access the database is only for a quick update, peek some data, or a simple query.

If you, like me, find yourself in possession of databases and need to quickly pull up a simple interface to visually browse them, Adminer is for you. If you need an application development and deployment stack you'll find Adminer solves only a small portion of it.

Curiously, all the things I used to love about the language I now consider major liabilities and footguns. Outside of wordpress I'd have a hard time recommending it—it's so different from other webserver setups you're likely to prolong your frustration. Not to mention it's an ugly language with an incredibly inconsistent runtime library.

Also, you can do it in C - sqlite's "amalgamation" is proof of that, but they use a bundler tooling IIRC.

There's also PsySH, https://psysh.org/, for being something other than a Common Lisp or BEAM interface it's a very nice REPL. Besides Picolisp and iex it's the interactive programming environment I use the most.

Development evidently happens in the traditional sense with the project in a nicely defined tree.

The build process looks pretty gnarly, but it works! https://github.com/vrana/adminer/blob/master/compile.php