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Well Notepad++ is a good general purpose editor on windows (I dont know
context). I liked ActiveState Komodo Edit too, which has a free version.

For serious code editing on Windows, the good visual editors are:
- jruby based Redcar (free and really good)
- Sublime Text 2 (in pre-2.0 and technically not free)
both are cross platform, so swapping between UNIXes and MacOS will not
leave you short on familiar tools.

Note for debugging in ruby most people use the plain old ruby-debug

On windows it should be already included in your Ruby version.

To use it, just add the method 'debugger' into your code

i.e.

def do_something
  *debugger* unless everything_ok
  thing_that_could_break
end

The debugger line will launch you into a REPL shell like IRB that lets you
inspect your code in place. Visual Debuggers will feel like such a straight
jacket afterwards. Used in conjunction with a gem like *awesome_print* for
clean inspection of complex data, its a great way to debug.

Failing that, non-free Java IDEs like Ruby Mine may give you a compelling
visual experience. Netbeans is good too, until Oracle booted Ruby support
out of the roadmap and latest version. I haven't used Eclipse in a while,
but I imagine it is still compelling (but Netbeans was better for pure Ruby
and related work), and there is also some work done on bringing Ruby
development into visual studio, though I have no 1st hand experience.

I am at a stage in my Ruby development where I want to break the shackles
of the mouse, as a result I am doing a lot more Vim. Thats a path you want
to try when you got someone to help you through though.

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Chris Meisenzahl <meisenzahl / gmail.com>wrote:

> Hey guys, new here.  ;-)
>
> Tinkering w/ Ruby (on Windows), working through a book. So far for an
> editor I've been using the free ConTEXT and SciTE. Anything better I'm
> missing out on?
>
> Also, any decent visual debuggers available? It would be helpful to be
> able to walk through my code.
>
> Thanks very much in advance,
> Chris
> http://www.pretenseofknowledge.com/
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>


-- 
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