Vim and Emacs users, how to debug as effectively as Eclipse/Netbeans?

Question

After reading books like The Pragmatic Programmer, one thing it strongly suggested was to pick a text editor and master it. I chose to use Emacs and stuck with it for about half a year. However, the one thing that kept pulling me back to a full-fledged IDE was debugging.

After attempting to use xdebug via command-line for a couple of weeks, it was no surprise that the debugging tools that Netbeans/Eclipse provide are far superior to CLI.

So fellas, are there any Linux tools that allow you to place breakpoints and help visualize your application at run-time, or is there a reason why I should stick to suffering through CLI debugging?

Any feedback appreciated!

Answer 1

I'm using Vim all day for coding. But when it comes to debugging, I always take the debugger of my IDE (Visual Studio) because while debugging, I take the mouse and hoover over some variables, edit their values and so on. That's not a task that I'd need a powerful editor for.

That's my advice to you: for coding and editing, take an editor; for debugging take a (graphical) debugger (DDD, Eclipse, whatever). It's not a sacrilege to switch tools, only to take the wrong tools for the task to be done.