Ruby editor help...

[Kevin White]

Hey all,

I've been evaluating ruby/rails editors and ides over the last couple weeks, and would like some suggestions from you all.   Hopefully without starting a holy war, I'd like to get some of your suggestions on editors or ides for Ruby and Rails programming.

necessary features:

- syntax highlighting

- proper "re-indenting"/"re-formatting" of the code

- code templates (i.e.: type "if" and hit tab to expand into a standard if block ... little code cheats like that)

- ability to open many files at once (i.e.: textmate's "mate ." to open the whole folder structure)

- some sort of navigate command to quickly find/open a file in the current project or folder structure

preferred features:

- refactoring support

- scriptability

- debugging of ruby scripts and/or rails projects

- integrated rails support (i.e.: built-in console for running script and/or rake tasks)

I've tried:

TextWrangler: price is right, but features are weak.  Couldn't find any re-indent for a simple ruby script.

Aptana RadRails: *love* the rails integration, good syntax highlighting, decent refactoring.  But it has a problem with re-indentation of code blocks in simple if/else/end blocks wherever i used an array map.

TextMate: *love* the interface, good syntax highlighting, pretty decent refactoring.  But I couldn't find any reformatting command to re-indent code.

RubyMine: I wanted to love it.  But the trial license ran out before I really knew what i wanted in an editor, so am left without knowing if it would meet my needs or not.

BBEdit.  Haven't really tried it yet for ruby or rails.

NetBeans: just downloaded it and ready to put it through its paces

Vi/Vim: I love it at the command line, but I think I'd like a more hot-key based gui editor for ruby/rails. :)

Emacs: I gave up on it 10 years ago, though if it really does all this stuff easily, I'd consider stepping in again. :)

Thanks for any suggestions you all can give.

Kevin

--

Kevin White
jedir...@gmail.com

[Tim Harper]

I would personally recommend TextMate, vim, or emacs.  They are all fantastic editors, emacs and vim having the advantage of being uber-portable.

I use TextMate for ruby and have gotten really good mileage out of it.  It's easy to write you're own extensions (and I've written several to improve my work flow).  I've never once wanted a "reformat ruby command", but I definitely appreciate the command in emacs to reformat lisp... so who knows :S

Tim

[Jenica Jacobsen]

I haven't used the others, and am not a Rails developer by trade... but RubyMine has the syntax highlighting, re-indenting, code templates, and quick ctrl+n to find/open files.  I'm not sure if it has your opening may files at once, I don't think you can open all of the files in a file structure (but I've never really wanted to so maybe you can :) )

I've been told that the only reason I like RubyMine best is because of my existing familiarity with IntelliJ Idea for java.  :)

Good luck with your search for an editor.

Jenica

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Kevin White <jedir...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Nathan Lane]

If you want something that gives you a lot of help, both NetBeans and Aptana Studio offer a lot of support fro Ruby and Ruby on Rails specifically.

--
Nathan Lane
Blog, http://blog.nathandelane.com

[Brad Midgley]

Kevin

> TextWrangler: price is right, but features are weak. Couldn't find
> any re-indent for a simple ruby script.
>
> Aptana RadRails: *love* the rails integration, good syntax
> highlighting, decent refactoring. But it has a problem with re-
> indentation of code blocks in simple if/else/end blocks wherever i
> used an array map.
>
> TextMate: *love* the interface, good syntax highlighting, pretty
> decent refactoring. But I couldn't find any reformatting command to
> re-indent code.
>
> RubyMine: I wanted to love it. But the trial license ran out before
> I really knew what i wanted in an editor, so am left without knowing
> if it would meet my needs or not.

I was disappointed with textwrangler working with directories and
files smoothly and ruled it out. I experimented with rubymine, but the
beta tanked on loading a large rails project (probably not a fair
test) so it had to wait for my next little project. That hasn't
happened yet.

Double-click and keyboard-driven text selection drives me CRAZY in
textmate. Instead of selecting word by word (whitespace delimited) it
selects whole sentences (punctuation delimited). That breaks with
every other osx app.

Brad

[Roger Pack]

> TextMate: *love* the interface, good syntax highlighting, pretty decent
> refactoring.  But I couldn't find any reformatting command to re-indent
> code.

There's a ruby reformatting plugin somewhere, if that helps.
-r

[Eric Berry]

Any plugins for split view? My only gripe about textmate

[Mike Moore]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Eric Berry <cav...@gmail.com> wrote:

Any plugins for split view? My only gripe about textmate

I open two instances of TextMate on two different Spaces desktops and switch back and forth.

Kidding... :)

[MilesTogoe]

you don't really need a fancy IDE to give you those basic features - vim does it and if you don't want to remember the commands (like me) frankly gedit or kwrite does all those things too (incl code snippets).  simple is good - it's the craftsman, not the hammer. 

[Kevin White]

Thanks for all the comments guys.  I appreciate the perspective.

I'll take a look at some of the textmate plugins (bundles?  addons?  ... whatever they're called  ) and see where I can go with it.  NetBeans seems a bit slow, but very functional so far.  

Whatever I do, I need to get a second license of.  My son has finally taken an interest in programming and I'm teaching him ruby atm. :)  I do want us to have the same editing environment.

Thanks again,

Kevin White
jedir...@gmail.com

[Erick Cantwell]

> jedir...@gmail.com <mailto:jedir...@gmail.com>
>
This may be a bit late on the conversation, but I thought that I'd throw
my two cents in.

I'm personally a big fan of KDevelop (version 3.5.5. KDevelop 4 is
shaping up nicely, but it's still in beta and the plugins related to
Ruby other than syntax highlighting are basically non-existent). It has
a lot of great features for a plethora of languages. When I don't have
KDevelop handy I like to use Kate (as opposed to something other editors
on the same level like gedit).

--Erick Cantwell