On Jul 11, 2006, at 5:55 AM, Just Another Victim of the Ambient  
Morality wrote:
>     Can anyone recommend a good IDE?  Ah, the tired IDE  
> question...  I did a
> search on groups.google on this subject and, yes, it is a common  
> question.
> However, every instance of it seems to have the same theme.  Vi(m)  
> is the
> greatest text editor out there (I found Emacs too hard to learn).   
> Syntax
> highlighting is highly overrated and auto-completion is useless.   
> What I
> need from an IDE is a debugger!  Even if it were as simple as the  
> ability to
> place breakpoints, step into and over lines of code, display  
> evaluation
> results (like what IRB does), and list variables in scope.  It  
> would also be
> nice if it would let me evaluate methods of variables in scope, so  
> I can try
> to get the state of various objects.  Seriously, I'm tired of printf
> debugging (not that anyone uses printf in Ruby)...

Just to take things in a whole different direction, are you using  
test driven development?  I've found that TDD has eliminated a lot of  
my need for debugging.  It's a little like that printf debugging  
except that the printf's become asserts and you don't have to throw  
them away.  They stay useful.

That being said, Eclipse's RDT is supposed to handle debugging, but I  
haven't had much luck with it so far.
-Mat