On 7/11/06, Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality
<ihatespam / rogers.com> wrote:
> 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)...

Two suggestions, check out the breakpoint gem -- it is pretty much
what you say you want from a debugger. If what you really want is a
full IDE with a good integrated debugger, then you should check out
ArachnoEdit (ruby-ide.com). It is a commercial product, still in beta
that seems to get developed in a series of sprints. It has a custom
version of Ruby with a C extension for much faster debugging/stepping.

>     Can anyone recommend a good... I don't know the proper term for this
> but... a GUI toolkit?

Check the archive, we _just_ had this discussion: FXRuby, QtRuby,
wxRuby seem to be the primary choices.

pth