NetBeans to IntelliJ to Eclipse to NetBeans to Eclipse to IntelliJ - Evaluating IDEs for Ruby on Rails Development

rubyonrails-talk
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The following is a just a dump of my notes gathered over the last 7 weeks as I hopped from IDE to IDE in search of the perfect IDE for RoR. Unfortunately, there isn't one... and the perfect one would be made up of different features from all three. I concede that a number of the gripes below are are of a general nature and not specific to RoR... but I thought I'd just dump my notes here as they may be of interest to somebody about to embark on a similar IDE tour.

Generally speaking, NetBeans has the most complete support for RoR.. with code navigation, auto-complete etc. .. but IntelliJ is the most superior all-round editor. Eclipse is literally in between.

- NetBeans gripes... +Howto set keymap for "go to file" to Ctl+Shift+N ? ... can't find "go to file" in the keymaps screen... will concentrate instead on howto import my intellij keymap +does nb have a similar feature as "scroll to source" in intellij? ... James has pointed out the "select in" from the editor window popup .. but still looking for an options to have the navigator   pane and editor pane always in sync ::>gave up on NetBeans... trying out IntelliJ's Ruby support after a few key things missing driving me nuts in NetBeans... + autoscroll to source + expand selection from cursor ... ctrl+w + paste from clipboard history ... ctrl+shift+insert + Open File support not as good as intellij (which itself is not ideal).. the problem is that there are so many files with the same name in a rails app ... eg, "show.html.erb" ... which NetBeans will give you a result list of mammoth proportions ... IntelliJ allows you to specify (for example) foo_bars\show .. which narrows down the search result dramatically ... It would be even better however if it allowed us to do *bar*show or even *bars\show because in our app there are just so many entities that are named foo_..

- moved to IntelliJ plus Ruby plugin

- svn hell ... upgraded tortise to 1.5 and did svn up .. only to find that svn integration via IDEA stopped working ... complaining about the client being too old...

- much pain and suffering whilst moving from IDEA to Eclipse ... the keymappings don't all seem to take ... (eg, Ctrl+W for select.. ) ... and svn integration is crap compared to IDEA ... but IDEA is pre 1.5 so cannot go back now anyway

- eclipse gripes... + doesn't have copy-from-clipboard-history or whatever intellij calls it + collapse all does not work in x_spec.rb .. does not collapse "describe" or "it" blocks + does not have unnamed or even just numbered bookmarks .. they all need to have a name and are project-scope, not page scope + invoking synchronize forces change of perspective .. should be able to sync from within the RadRails/Ruby perspective

- try NetBeans again .. gripes: + cannot search keymapping easily to allow modify.. eg, I could right- click in editor and Select In -> Projects but if I wanted that keymapped I could not easily find it in the keymapping dialog. I tried modifying some other keymap to the same keys so's to get a clue from the key clash error message but all I got was "already assigned to Select Node in Projects action" .. which gave me no clue as to the fact it resided under Window -> Window/Select Document In + keymapping to run rb file does not work repeatedly, and when via mouse a new tab is opened for each invocation + svn integration not as good as intellij

- Ruby debugger ... check again what is available in IntelliJ .. may have to go back to NetBeans? ::>The Eclipse debugger does not work for jruby ... ruby only ... and our app no longer works with ruby only now that we have dependencies/imports on/of java code ::>NetBeans debugger is is really, really slow .. but at least it works. ::>Ruby debugging to be supported in IntelliJ in september

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As you didn't mention Ruby In Steel, maybe I could mention that we have the fastest integrated debugger for standard Ruby - and we debug JRuby too. Our Ruby debugger includes breakpoints, tracepoints, conditional beakpoints, hover+drilldown debugging (expand arrays, hashes and other objects), call stack navigation, dynamic debugging (change variable values and actual types while debugging) and much more...

Here is some more info: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Debugging-Ruby-with-the-Cylon http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Dynamic-Debugging-In-Ruby http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-Debugger-Enhancements http://www.sapphiresteel.com/How-To-Debug-Ruby-Inside-RHTML http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-Debugging-with-Cylon-Tutorial

best wishes Huw Collingbourne SapphireSteel Software

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- NetBeans gripes... +Howto set keymap for "go to file" to Ctl+Shift+N ? ... can't find "go to file" in the keymaps screen...

Open the keymap, and "Go To File..." is listed under the "Tools" category. Yeah, that's a strange place. We're well aware that the keymaps editor needs improvements (and in particular, search).

+does nb have a similar feature as "scroll to source" in intellij? ...

I'm not sure what feature this is.

James has pointed out the "select in" from the editor window popup .. but still looking for an options to have the navigator pane and editor pane always in sync

Just FYI, Ctrl-Shift-1 does it so you don't have to do this via the mouse every time,

+ expand selection from cursor ... ctrl+w

This is Ctrl-Shift-. (dot) in NetBeans. With comma it goes the opposite direction.

+ Open File support not as good as intellij (which itself is not ideal).. the problem is that there are so many files with the same name in a rails app ... eg, "show.html.erb" ... which NetBeans will give you a result list of mammoth proportions ... IntelliJ allows you to specify (for example) foo_bars\show .. which narrows down the search result dramatically ... It would be even better however if it allowed us to do *bar*show or even *bars\show because in our app there are just so many entities that are named foo_..

Ok. You might want to use Go To Type instead of Go To File, which despite the name lets you jump to arbitrary classes, modules or methods. (To jump to an arbitrary method, prefix it with #, e.g. #to_s lets you jump to all the to_s methods). In the Go To Type dialog you can do all kinds of filtering -- wildcards/regexps, camelcase matching, etc.

+ cannot search keymapping easily to allow modify.. eg, I could right-

Yep, we know - and it's definitely slated for a rewrite.

click in editor and Select In -> Projects but if I wanted that keymapped I could not easily find it in the keymapping dialog.

That one already has a default keybinding - Ctrl-Shift-1 (which should also be shown in the context menu on the right hand side).

::>NetBeans debugger is is really, really slow .. but at least it works.

Really? Can you provide more details on this? The debugger should support the fast debugger interface for C Ruby (it will attempt to install the relevant gem) which should make debugger really fast. And in recent (6.5) builds of NetBeans we also have fast debugger support for JRuby now that JRuby has hooks for it.

-- Tor

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Thanks Huw, I didn't know VisualStudio supported Ruby ... but I'm not likely to get VisualStudio. In fact I'm a wisker away from ditching Vista entirely in favour of Ubuntu... the "Host Process" error dialog is doing my head in.

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Just FYI, Ctrl-Shift-1 does it so you don't have to do this via the mouse every time,

Yes.. that is my dream .. to throw the mouse away ... don't want to waste any time moving my fingers from the keyboard! Seriously though... in Eclipse and IntelliJ there is the ability to "Link with Editor" (Eclipse) or "Autoscroll to/from Source" (IntelliJ) ... which is a "sticky" version of the Ctrl-Shift-1 functionality of NetBeans.

> + expand selection from cursor ... ctrl+w

This is Ctrl-Shift-. (dot) in NetBeans. With comma it goes the opposite direction.

Yes... I had found this functionality in NetBeans, but it's not as fine-grained as IntelliJ's which expands based on whitespace, camelCase, dots, brackets etc. ... but hey... you're one up on Eclipse which still only supports ctrl +arrow+shift selection.

Ok. You might want to use Go To Type instead of Go To File, which despite the name lets you jump to arbitrary classes, modules or methods. (To jump to an arbitrary method, prefix it with #, e.g. #to_s lets you jump to all the to_s methods). In the Go To Type dialog you can do all kinds of filtering -- wildcards/regexps, camelcase matching, etc.

I did use that for classes... but it did not help for *.html.erb files

> ::>NetBeans debugger is is really, really slow .. but at least it > works.

Really? Can you provide more details on this? The debugger should support the fast debugger interface for C Ruby (it will attempt to install the relevant gem) which should make debugger really fast. And in recent (6.5) builds of NetBeans we also have fast debugger support for JRuby now that JRuby has hooks for it.

I was debugging a spec test... if that makes any difference to debugging versus any other ruby code?

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Tor, probably the biggest problem I have with JRoR dev on Netbeans is the file open, given that I'm often opening files such as html.erb, spec, rake, yml. Even if it only supported wildcard replacement *foo* etc it would be a vast improvement. Otherwise I think the IDE is great, I especially like the code completion and associated "doc helper", thanks.

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Sam wrote:

Thanks Huw, I didn't know VisualStudio supported Ruby ... but I'm not likely to get VisualStudio.

Just to clarify - we can provide a free copy of Visual Studio with Ruby In Steel for anyone who doesn't have a regular copy.

In fact I'm a wisker away from ditching Vista entirely in favour of Ubuntu... the "Host Process" error dialog is doing my head in.

What is the 'Host Process' error dialog? I have never come across that.

best wishes Huw

SapphireSteel Software Ruby and Rails In Visual Studio http://www.sapphiresteel.com

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Just as an update .. I moved from Vista to Ubuntu and stuck with IntelliJ + Ruby plugin until I hit a showstopper bug..

So I was forced to move quickly back to either NetBeans or Eclipse ... and since NetBeans required less setup than Eclipse I've run with that. I've been happy with the Ruby support on NetBeans although some of the refactoring is not as good as IntelliJ's Ruby. I have also found the svn support in NetBeans not as good as IntelliJ so I'm using IntelliJ for svn (the bug only affects ruby) and NetBeans for Ruby.

Aside from the things specified above, I would really like to see in NetBeans... + The ability to exclude directories so that, for example, tmp/war does not show up in my searches + The ability to rerun a spec test that I've just invoked via Run > Run File.. even after I have navigated away from that file. ie, have NetBeans rerun the last thing I ran without having to use the mouse on the Rerun button on the Ouput tab.