I've previously griped about the lack of a good IDE for Ruby on Rails and despite trying out TextMate for a month I just wasn't happy enough with it – I'm still spending far too much time navigating files and not enough time coding. There's a lot of talk about just using VIM and being happy with that (example) but that VIM just doesn't have a good enough interface for selecting which file to edit and navigating the file system, let alone for quickly scanning files to find the section I want.
Fortunately, this evening I went out Googling for a better solution and found Ruby Development Tools – a set of Ruby plugins for Eclipse. It's perfect for me (and probably most other Java to Ruby converts) - an editing interface that I'm intimately familiar with, simple navigation of the file hierarchy and as a bonus, support for the Eclipse Outline view to jump to a specific method etc and Test::Unit support (not that I actually know how to use Test::Unit yet but this might prompt to actually do the right thing and start writing tests).
It's still very much beta software but is quite usable as is and hopefully more of the Eclipse feature set will make it in soon.
Rob - author of jEdit's Ruby Plugin says:
Another Ruby editor you might like to try out is the Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit:
http://www.jedit.org/ruby/
It has code completion for the Ruby core types and an integrated RDoc viewer.
Adrian Sutton says:
Thanks Rob, that’s good to know. Sadly I’ve always hated jEdit’s interface with a passion so I’ll probably give it a miss. Others seem to like jEdit though so it would probably be a good option for them.
AnonymousCoward says:
FreeRIDE ?
Daniel Wintschel says:
Totally late to the game, but so far I’ve tried a ton of Ruby editors, and the best I’ve found (imho) is RadRails, which is based on eclipse. I also tried the JEdit plugin, RDT tools for eclipse, Komodo (which is good) and FreeRIDE (among a few others I’m probably forgetting).
RadRails is open source / freeware, and you can get it here: http://www.radrails.org (also, I have nothing to do with the RadRails project whatsoever).
Umesha says:
Among all available Rails IDE’s, my favorite is RadRails
Amrlafi says:
try Arachno Ruby IDE ,here :http://www.ruby-ide.com/ruby/ruby_ide_and_ruby_editor.php
Great IDE, commericial but effortable $29, and i’m not affiliating !
Jon says:
I’ve been banging my head against the ruby/java editor brick wall for quite some time now, tried dozens, there is some argument for dipping your toe back into jEdit again. I accept that the Java user interface is a bit unnatractive, but there is a lot you can do to beautify it, eg:
http://www.jedit.org/index.php?page=screenshot&image=33
It only takes the download of a new icon set jar file to change everything.
You can download a console plugin and then compile and run from the F7 and F5 keys, it takes minutes to learn how to set up and I find myself liking it more and more, the more and more I run into things I don’t like about other editors.
Leslie Kaye says:
I have just released an IDE for Windows users. Still beta but usable
http://www.les-kaye.com/
BhaviK Patel says:
Hello..
I have worked on the basics of Ruby On Rails,
but I think the radrails in the best editor i have experienced till now.
But will have to still try for the codegear editor for Ruby on Rails.
Thanx.
BhaviK