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The quest for a Ruby IDE

One of the reason it was so hard for me to enjoy Ruby is the lack of a decent IDE. Coming from the Java world I’ve become kind of IDE addicted. If you have ever used wonderful IntelliJ IDEA you got my point :) .

I have tried most of the Ruby-aware IDEs and editors available: Emacs, VIM, Arachno Ruby, FreeRIDE, Eclipse/RDT, ActiveState Komodo to name a few. I even managed to tweak IntelliJ IDEA a little to support Ruby highlighting.

So, it turned out (as I expected though) that no one even comes close to IntelliJ IDEA. The reason is that IMO IDEA is a perfect blend of excellent editor and Java-aware functionality. Most of the tools above are either good editors or half-baked IDE attempts hardly comparable to IDEA.

Currently my personal favorite is VIM (gVIM) + Linux console. This combo provides a great all-around editor and some most basic functions of an IDE like running programs and test suites.

It is true that Ruby requires IDE much less that Java does. Though I do miss certain IDEA features, mostly outstanding refactoring support. Nevertheless I’m not looking back – the whole environment seems much more productive and fun, at least for now :)

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This entry was posted on December 7, 2006 at 14:32 and is filed under Ruby. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.

2 Comments on “The quest for a Ruby IDE”

  1. rubbish Says:

    December 8, 2006 at 15:35

    Hi, this is a comment that wants A. Maslov to start blogging about Ruby and dynamic languages.

    Reply
  2. oshyshko Says:

    December 20, 2006 at 10:42

    I had the same feeling of “give me Ruby IDE plz!” after years of brilliant IntelliJ IDEA.

    I tried FreeRIDE, Komodo, Mondrian, Ruby plug-in for IDEA and SciTE.

    FreeRIDE seems to be very nice. But inability to access file menu via ALT and that the editor window losts its focus on every run just killing me (that’s it, the killer app! :-) .

    I decided to stay with SciTE text editor that comes with “One-click Ruby Installer” (http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller/).

    It is so powerful as what you an IDE, but it is simple and has some good features:
    - folding
    - highlighting
    - run on F5 (in a docked window)

    What I changed in default settings for SciTE:
    - made all fonts fixed-width (read in SciTE FAQ)
    - changed launch command from “ruby.exe” to “rubyw.exe” to get rid of console popup

    The most annoying thing is that SciTE doesn’t remember last size/position of main window.

    As for Linux, an old friend “mcedit” with syntax highlight for Ruby is good.

    Two bad things about SciTE and mcedit: they are just text editors, so
    - there is no debugging
    - there is no refactoring

    Reply

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