What do you use to write and test Cg shaders?

Hi guys,
I will apologise in advance for being a complete noob, but I can't seem to find any help on this.

I'm very new to shaders, so I'm trying to go through the Cg Tutorial from NVIDIA and want to write and test the cg code examples, but I can't find an IDE for cg. I'm on a Mac and would ideally like something that I can write the code in and view a result. What do you guys use for cg shader writing and how do you test your shaders?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

 

Typing by hand into a shader text file

Actually I mostly use my Shader Wizard asset to just throw together a basic cg shader and then modify/expand it from there. I'd like to know too if there is some more visual shader-generating software. I suppose you could use Strumpy or some other visual editor thing.

 

Hi, thanks for the quick reply. Is it possible to code in Strumpy? I thought it was just node based.
Thanks.

 

Shader Forge will make this easy for you. Also, cool thing about shaders in unity is that you can see the results in realtime even when playing a game, as shaders compile separately.

 

mono is a not enough? I mostly use it along with notepad++. As for testing, I do it upon a cube.