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Comment by hopeless | Hacker News Reader

Nooooo....

I've gradually moved away from NetBeans as a general Ruby/Rails editor but I often came back for the great debugging support.

Any suggestion for alternative Rails debuggers?

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https://github.com/astashov/vim-ruby-debugger

Works really well once you've sorted a few quirks - it's what finally allowed me to fully switch from NetBeans to Vim about a month ago.

Hint: add the following to your .vimrc if using MacVim:

    let g:ruby_debugger_progname = 'mvim'

Thanks for the tip - will be checking this out tonight. Double thanks for the MacVim tip - I'm sure I would have been tripped up and off to Google without it.

I have heard positive things said about RubyMine from JetBrains. However, it is not free and some complain of slow project parse times at startup. Disclaimer: I do have an off and on professional relationship with JetBrains.

RubyMine is amazing for large Rails projects. I can jump between methods in different modules, classes even across gems (a simple command-click on the method, class or module name). You can quickly traverse source trees without the cumbersome grep/find that you'd do in a basic text editor.

Running specific tests is also a snap; just place your cursor in the desired spec and command-shift-r (built in support for spork).

I'm not in any affiliated with JetBrains (swear); just a satisfied customer.

I've moved away from it to just using TextMate.

But I always thought that RadRails was pretty good. YMMV

http://aptana.com/products/radrails

ruby-debug?

urgh... yes I've used it but I was hoping for something a little less 1980's. We can have multiple windows now ;-)

I find it useful to be able to see the current stack, drill into variables, view my code with syntax highlighting, and the current line all at the same time. It helps me understand where I am.

RubyMine is something you may want to look into then. While it's commercial, you can often get a free license if you work on an open-source project.

(I won a free license as a prize at a conference a few years back and it's really quite nice.)

Oh I wish somebody would bring that 1980 technology to Java / .NET.

It would make things so much easier for me.

There is an an emacs interface to ruby-debug. See http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/rdebug-emacs.html

The rewrite of ruby-debug for Rubinius currently supports syntax highlighting via CodeRay. See https://github.com/rocky/rbx-trepanning or https://github.com/rocky/rbx-trepanning/wiki/Terminal-Colors for how to set that up.

The github project Emacs interface for the newer series of debuggers is https://github.com/rocky/emacs-dbgr.

But as someone else pointed out, it sounds like you'd be happier using an IDE such as one from JetBrains, Aptana, or Eclipse.

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