A quote from an answer/comment before:
"[...] ... just do what is written, add PATH variable ... [...]"
... That's exactly a common misunderstanding between helping people (who are mostly not teachers), who do the tasks on a daily basis, and asking people on the other hand, who can imagine 3 different things behind standartized answers and their words. Stackoverflow should extend on this, not repeat manuals or documentations.
In PHPstorm for example, you have 2 empty fields after hitting the plus on the right corner of the Enviroment variable settings window. The left field has the header "Variable", the right field the header "Value". So, if somebody is not familiar with PATH and ENVIROMENT variables of desktop or server systems, this person will be slidely confused about what has to be placed in the first field. Is it "ruby"? Is it "PATH"? Wouldn't it override the whole PATH variable of the system? Is it a custom given NAME I can choose and how does the system knows about it? No explanation can be found.
If you don't know the logic behind, you cannot assume the right steps from this standart formulated advice. While I am very excited about the feature set of PHPstorm I find the documentation slidely too standartized and unexplainable. Thats why many entries have bad votes from readers below. Like if somebody would ask: "how do I bake bred?" and the answerer says: "First you have to prepare flour and create dough, then you can bake bred." So what do the asker has learned from this answer? Exactly. Nothing what he didn't knew already before. Ok, maybe the question was not clear enough, but this is also a common case: how to ask correctly if you don't know what you actually ask for? From where can the person know, that there is a need to understand how to set PATH variables? I think this is what differs between makers and teachers. Teachers learn to communicate that gap. Documentation often lacks of better teachers writing it. People who work in the support team should be better in thinking like teachers.
To become more constructive: The documentation of PHPstorm says in its example: "choose PATH_TO_LIB as NAME and the path to the library for the VALUE field." Again: from where does this PATH_TO_LIB comes? Is it an own given Name, or a prepared empty VARIABE name PHPstorm watches? If something wents wrong and you start to look for issues which may cause this and start to worry about wrong settings you are lost on this questions even as an experienced PHP developer.
I generally prefer using tools like guard and RVM based ruby installations ATM over build in watch file solutions like these from PHPstorm, which mostly look for a system wide ruby and such first. But with rvm we have project based paths to ruby and such. RVM prevents breaking the compiling-chain of long term theme or module developments based on certain gem versions. Watch here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmTuvzbPduI where Sebastian Siemssen (well known Drupal developer) explains why this is a good concept. But to nicely implement this with PHPstorm features, you need a better low level entry to path editing in PHPstorm.
Sadly this involves pressing save again, since this needs the save file event to be triggered. I would love to see a better implementation, flexibility and better explanation of how to go with the PHPstorm in-build watchers to have a refresh on edit at hand.
