Ruby Editors - The Choices For Non-Mac And Non-VI People
by Jim Mulholland Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:03:00 GMT was interesting enough to generate 14 comments so far
I read an interesting blog post on The Devver Blog regarding the results of a Ruby development survey. The results of the “which development tool do you use” question were very similar to the same question asked in a November 2007 survey on ongoing.
To summarize these 2 surveys, the IDE of choice among Ruby developers can be broken down into 3 basic camps:
- If you are a Mac user you probably use TextMate
- If you are not on a Mac but you have taken the time to learn VI, you use VI / VIM. (There is a also a good chance you are using Time Pope’s rails.vim plugin. I played with this plugin a bit last night and am very impressed.)
- If you are not on a Mac and have decided against going the VI/VIM route, you have probably gone (or are going) through a dozen or so editors trying to find the one that is the best match for you.
As I mentioned in a previous article, I split time between a Mac and an Ubuntu machine. When I am on my Mac, I use TextMate. With Ubuntu, I have explored several options over the past 2+ years:
- VI / VIM – Fast and powerful, but it sure is a pain in the butt to remember all of those key combinations. However, I may take another look after playing with rails.vim this evening. I have found that my VI-fu has been getting better as I edit more stuff directly on our servers with VI.
- Emacs – I personally do not remember trying Emacs, but I’m pretty sure I did. It is in a similar vein as VI in that they are both 30+ years old (both were started in 1976 according to Wikipedia) with good sized learning curves. With that being said, it does appear to be powerful. Here is a good Emacs with Rails screencast from the platypope.org blog.
- NetBeans – A very full featured IDE that just got Ruby / Rails support within the past year. It has a lot of nice features including a great integrated debugger. However, it is heavy. It takes a very long time to load and my system gets slower the longer that I use it. Definitely worth a look if you have a beefy system or do not mind some wait time.
- Eclipse / RadRails – Full-featured IDE in a similar vein to NetBeans. RadRails was the first IDE I used when I first started with Rails a couple of years ago. I was coming from a Microsoft .NET background where full-featured IDE’s like Visual Studio were the norm and RadRails had a similar feel. I’m sure it has changed a lot since I used it last in 2006, but I honestly have not used it since then. (I stopped using it when I purchased my MacBook in August 2006.)
- gedit – gedit was my editor of choice on Ubuntu for quite a while. It is very lightweight, supports plugins, and comes preloaded on Ubuntu. There are quite a few blogs posts out there about how to make it more “Rails friendly” such as this post on grigio.org. My biggest complaint with gedit at the time and the reason I left to find another tool was that it did not have a built-in “find in files” so it was a huge hastle to find method definitions and other key-words. This has since been partially solved with a gedit find in files plugin by Vince Wadhwani from the Urban Puddle blog. (I say “partially” because of an issue searching multiple levels down.)
- Other editors that I have not tried include IntelliJ, jedit, scITE, Komodo (not free), 3rdRail (not free), among dozens of others. There were actually 47 editors with at least 1 vote in the ongoing article.
My current Ruby editor / IDE of choice at the moment?
GEANY (Ironically, Geany was NOT in the list of 47 editors voted for in the ongoing article.)
Why Geany?
It is very lightweight yet powerful with very little upfront configuration (unlike gedit). Features include syntax highlighting, code folding, files browsing, class/method browsing, jump directly to method declarations, integrated terminal, plugin support, and snippets.
The following quote is from a Softpedia review:Geany is the best Linux IDE I've used until now. I think it will become more and more adopted by Linux developers, because it manages to combine robustness with power. There are other IDEs out there as well, but they seem to lack most of the abilities Geany has. Once you use Geany, I'm sure you will not switch to another IDE.
Geany does have its drawbacks and is a ways away from being the next TextMate, but it is the best Ubuntu IDE I have found for us non-VI folk. I think if you are a jedit or gedit fan, you owe it to yourself to at least give Geany a look. If you are a fan of full blown IDE’s like NetBeans or RadRails, it may not be for you.
I will try to give a more in-depth review with its Pros and Cons for Ruby developers in a not too distant blog post.
For even more information on Ruby editors, I found this forum thread on RAILSforum helpful.
Are there any other good Ruby editors that I should check out?
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Comments
about 5 hours later:
There’s a free version of Komodo, called Komodo Edit, they just released a new version in fact last week :D
about 5 hours later:
I’ve been using Textpad for years. Still love it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textpad
I use it with the clip library and syntax highlighting extensions for ruby.
about 6 hours later:
There also Gedit-Rails https://github.com/grigio/gedit-rails/tree
about 7 hours later:
I’m fairly new to RoR, but I was searching for something that would suffice in place of Textmate, since I am on Windows, and I came across E-TextEditor. It’s in beta, but it’s supposed to be the equivalent of Textmate for Windows users.
I’ve had nothing but a great experience with it so far. They look almost identical. As for functionality, I don’t know if Textmate is any better…I haven’t tried it.
You can download a 30-day trial version, and then it costs 34.95 after that. I purchased it at the end of the trial. Check it out if you haven’t heard of it.
about 7 hours later:
Grigio,
Very nice!
Your blog post describing the plugin is not in English.
http://grigio.org/gedit_rails_grigio_edition
Can you translate what it does? :-)
about 7 hours later:
@Jim: It simply says to get Gedit-Rails from Github and run “install.sh” to have all the Gedit customizations with one command.
Here are the plugins installed by the script: http://github.com/grigio/gedit-rails/tree/master/plugins
about 7 hours later:
@Person – Thanks for the heads up about Komodo Edit. I had not seen that before.
@Mike and @Stephanie – I’m not a Windows guy anymore, so I have not tried TextPad or E-Text Editor.
I have heard good things about E-Text Editor. I wish they would port it to Linux. They have been talking about it for almost a year now:
http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/e_v10_released
about 10 hours later:
Thanks for the link (I’m from Devver). The editor space in Ruby is very interesting, a ton of options. I have gone through most of the larger ones. I am currently in the process of leaving Netbeans as it has been getting slower and slower and killing my machine.
I don’t think I will go back to radrails and almost everything I do is in the command line now so I think I am headed to Emacs, as I have used it a bunch in the past.
about 17 hours later:
I’ve had a lot of success with notepad++, its free and works just great. Windows only though.
about 19 hours later:
I recommend IntelliJ Idea. The fullness of its hotkeys is unsurpassed in any editor I’ve tried (I used a bunch). One thing thats nice is that you can go directly to the side panes using Alt+number. I have not seen any other editor do this.
Its search integration is also very nice. You can jump through project-wide search results with a hotkey and selectively apply replace operations from the list.
It also has source integration. One thing thats nice is it allows you to jump to places where you have edited the file since the last commit. Changes are represented on the side of the editor. You can also rollback individual changes.
There are some other handy hotkeys, like Ctrl+w, which expands your selection every time ‘w’ is pressed. This is very useful for selecting parts of camelcase or _ case names and sentences.
Theres split pane views, a console view, and a ruby plugin. Definitely worth a look. They got a lot of power user interaction concepts correct, which is very rare.
I only wish for it to be open source and for it to have a smaller footprint. Hopefully an open source editor will prove more effective.
about 20 hours later:
Yes, E-Texteditor is very functional and efficient even on my smallest machine. Worth it even though not free.
http://www.e-texteditor.com/index.html
Netbeans has more features, and is free, but needs a more powerful development machine than you otherwise need for RoR. Get a quad-core with 8 gigabytes and run Netbeans. Or use E on a small laptop and develop anywhere.
Is the root cause of Netbeans trouble it’s big Java base?
I’m an old Emacs hand, and tried the RoR setup for Emacs a year or so ago and it was too much trouble. I’ve lost patience with Emacs and anything that takes more than 20 minutes to set up gets tossed out. Emacs can take days and days to tweak right.
4 days later:
A similar post I did for IDEs for Windows at http://rupakg.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/rails-ide-on-windows
18 days later:
I would like to second Geany. It has a great syntax highlighter. I also love the built-in terminal, but even better would be two (or three)! Also nice is the built-in diff tool.
25 days later:
I use Komodo, really efficient, Perl Style on Ruby is great
Have a take?