I understand that you want something different than what you’ve found, but your comment here is unhelpful.

did not work

Out of their own kindness, people have given you detailed instructions with screenshots. “Did not work” is your response - no detail about what went wrong, error messages, etc. Anyone else who might have the same problem gets no help from you here in tracking it down further.

Elixir is missing a good IDE, someone needs to step up

People have mentioned editors with debuggers, as you asked about. To dismiss them as not “good” is rather rude. If they don’t suit your needs, give details on why.

Nobody “needs to step up” to make something for free just because you want it. You are not surrounded by cowardly people, afraid to “step up” and take responsibility for something that is morally imperative to do, as your comment seems to imply. People just don’t all want the same thing.

Here’s how you could respond more constructively:

Thanks everyone for taking the time to help me with this. Unfortunately I’m still having trouble. I tried , but I still get an error like [y] when I [z]. For context, I’m using [OS version, Elixir version, editor configuration, commands typed, etc].

and/or

I wish there were an IDE that [does blah]. If there are others out there who feel the same way, [let’s work together to build one | I don’t have the skills to build one myself, but I’d be happy to support you building one with funding and documentation help].

I feel like tracing (or even IO.inspecting) makes a lot more sense than step-by-step debugging in Elixir, mostly because of the concurrence, pausing a process in the middle of its operation is not something that would normally occur on the BEAM, and can have side effects that would make the scenario totally different from the one you are trying to repeat.

My general advice for Erlang/Elixir programs is to never ever use a debugger. Instead rely solely on logs and the occasional tracing. Besides being concurrent there are two other reasons:

1. no devops in their right mind would allow you to attach a debugger on a production system. Instead learn to rely on logs from the start. Can’t figure it out with your current logs ? Add more!
2. a lure of functional programming is code correctness. By using small functions and pattern matching it is usually trivial to pin-point errors and these should mainly be pre-condition errors. Code too complicate ? Break them down into more functions.

Tracing is the main reason why no serious Elixir application should use POPs (plain old processes). With GenServer, GenStateMachine, GenEvent etc you can turn on/off tracing on the fly, in production and dev without worries.

Tracing is one of the great advantages of BEAM not really found in any other systems.

I mostly use IEx.pry/0

https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/debugging.html#iexpry0-and-iexbreak2

I use the ElixirLS addon for VSCode, but the debugging plugin has real issues. The main problem here is the fact that an Elixir app has several processes running concurrently and in parallel, so the debugger often goes completely bananas.

And never mind setting up the configurations, that’s uncharted territory few actually understand.

Unfortunately, as fair as I know, nothing beats using an IO.puts…