Bill Shupp Software engineer, photographer, musician, space geek

PHP step debugging in VIM

When debugging problems in PHP, most of the time it's easiest to just add var_dump($foo); exit; in the middle of your script, and you can see the contents of $foo right in your browser.  But if you have to do much more, this approach gets cumbersome pretty quickly.  I've recently been using step debugging for harder to track down problems.  It allows me to examine the state of things all the way through execution of a request, line by line, or skipping ahead to break points.  This process also gives you more insight into everything else happening in a request, which can be useful when you're using frameworks or other 3rd party code in your application.