Which free RoR IDE would you recommend?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm a newbie and I'd like the support that an IDE provides. Searching around the web reveals a number of options and I was wondering whether there were one or two that stood out above the others?

TIA, David

2

David,

I use Textmate (http://www.macromates.com), however, I’m on the Mac. Can’t speak to Windows based editors.

Has lots of support for Ruby and ROR.

  • Justin
3

Personally, I'm opposed to IDEs. They *enable* complexity by making it easier to avoid facing. Without one, you'll avoid it because it'll be right in your face. I typically use a program called TextMate and have developed a fairly good sized app using just it. If you stick to the MVC convention, you can too. If you insist on an IDE, NetBeans is pretty good

Best regards Bill

4

NetBeans 6.1 is my choice. It has excellent, thorough support for RoR development.

5

Textmate is pretty much the official editor for Rails, but you might want to look at Aptana: http://www.aptana.com/

6

i prefer netbeans over aptana, but that is just a person preference. they are both very capable IDE’s.

Jason

7

I prefer NetBeans too.

8

Textmate is pretty much the official editor for Rails, but you might want to look at Aptana: http://www.aptana.com/

9

I'm using MacVim (and gVim when at work on my Windows box) these days. I like it quite a bit. I used to use TextMate, but found the expansive UI got in the way sometimes when on the road. As I grew with Vim, I found that I really missed its modal nature when I went back to TextMate. So, MacVim it is.

Hopefully TextMate 2 supports modal editing (via a plugin or otherwise).

James H.

10

Radrails (if you can get it downloaded and working it's pretty awesome). definetly has it's drawbacks, but is powerful and very helpful.

11

I'm using Aptana RadRails. It could be better but I like it. Overall, it's like a text editor with file manager, rails console and server manager.

12

This is one of those topics that seems to evoke heated arguments. Many people swear that a real programmer won't use anything but a terminal window. I like an IDE and I don't do "catch and release" fly fishing either. So, now that you know that a purist I am not...

I have both Netbeans and Apatana on my box. I use Aptana just because it gives good continuity between the file structure and the files you want to edit. BUT... I also run a terminal at the same time. The Aptana IDE has a bug where it will not kill the mongrel process, but it tells you it has. Don't start or stop your server with Apatana and don't try to debug inside Aptana. Use the terminal window.

I wish Textmate would run on Ubuntu, if it did, I would use it, but I don't have a mac. (the next reply will tell me that it does and I will feel stupid)

13

I don’t have anything againts IDE’s…

My choice is Aptana… I’m on Linux, Ubuntu to be specific :slight_smile:

Marcelo.

14

Yay. This is “Choose My Editor For Me” Thread #249423497!

15

* David Schwartz <davids58@gmail.com> [2008-05-28 12:21:30 -0700]:

I'm a newbie and I'd like the support that an IDE provides. Searching around the web reveals a number of options and I was wondering whether there were one or two that stood out above the others?

Vim

Cheers, Jan

16

Vim! Aptana's nice, but it's slow. I started with it because you don't have to learn those vim commands.. which took an extra 2 days of learning, but it was cool. I use Vim on Windows (if I must) and Ubuntu.

17

When i was working on windows I use RORED But now i use Textmate on MacOS X

18

I like textmate but one thing I have to give aptana credit for is the unit test runner. The TestRunner is essentially this viewpane that allows you to visualize your tests as a bar. As the tests run the bar moves forward and stays green until a test fails and it turns red. You can see all failed tests and a link to the exact line that failed for every test. Re-running tests or running only a specific subset all happens in a very nice visual way.

TextMate with Git, RoR, Haml and Shoulda bundles makes development pretty awesome too but if I had to pick an IDE it would be Aptana because it also supports javascript, php, css, html, etc fully with syntax highlighting, auto completion, error markings and more.

19

I’m sure TextMate could do all those things you listed.

20

I usually work on my application from three different places... at work, on a win box, I use ol'good Notepad++, tortoisesvn and cmd.exe. At home, both on laptop and desktop (Kubuntu/Win boxes) I have Aptana with Subclipse installed. I think it's just a matter of adapting yourself to the circumstances :wink:

Regards,

Rey9999