Asp Forum - what is the best ruby editor?

Edward

9/17/2006 8:06:00 PM

I downloaded both the EasyEclipse for Ruby and the EasyEclipse for
Python at http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/... and
found the one for Python to be excellent (debugging, intellisense,
syntax coloring all worked within 5 minutes).

However, with the the EasyEclipse for Ruby I couldn't get debugging to
work and the tabs don't work to such an extent that makes it tiresome
to use, and the intellisense doesn't work.

So I currently have resorted to JEdit which is a good general purpose
editor but not specifically for Ruby.

What free editors for Ruby are there which have debugging,
intellisense, syntax coloring and the regular macros, etc.? What do you
guys use?

Thanks,

Edward Tanguay
All my projects: http://www.ta...

22 Answers

khaines

9/17/2006 8:16:00 PM

James Britt

9/17/2006 8:22:00 PM

Edward wrote:
> ...
> What free editors for Ruby are there which have debugging,
> intellisense, syntax coloring and the regular macros, etc.? What do you
> guys use?

Vim 7.

There's a bunch of info in the list archives on this topic, though, so
you should (if you haven't already) look there first.

--
James Britt

"Inside every large system there's a small system trying to get out".
- Chet Hendrickson

Huw Collingbourne

9/17/2006 8:58:00 PM

If you have Visual Studio 2005, the free edition of Ruby In Steel gives you
most of what you want:
- color-coded editing
- multi-level undo/redo
- code folding
- debugging with breakpoints, watch variables, locals, globals for Ruby and
for Rails
- trace-into/ trace-over
- project management (tree structured projects of files and folders)
- project import
(etc.)

The free edition doesn't have intellisense but this will be added (including
scope-and-type sensitive auto completion, 'smart indenting', tabbed
snippets - among many other things) to the commercial edition due out in
January.

best wishes
Huw Collingbourne

http://www.sapphir...
Ruby Programming In Visual Studio 2005

Tassilo Horn

9/17/2006 10:11:00 PM

"Edward" <edward@tanguay.info> writes:

Hi Edward,

> What do you guys use?

I use GNU Emacs with ruby-mode.el, ruby-electric.el and ri-emacs. The
first two files come with ruby itself and provide syntax highlighting,
automatic indentation, abbrevations for common constructs (do ... end,
etc.), debugger integration, integration of irb and some other
goodies. ri-emacs [1] integrates ri into emacs and provides symbol
completion by looking up the ri-documentation. Another facility I use
for completion is Emacs' usual dabbrev-expand.

Another pretty cool thing seems to be irbsh [2], but this doesn't work
for me and it seems to be impossible to contact the author.

Bye,
Tassilo

Footnotes:
[1] http://rubyforge.org/projects...
[2] http://www.rubyist.net/~rubikitch/computer/irbsh/ind...
--
* delYsid has mortgage, opportunity and penis in his score file.
<delYsid> thats pretty effective against spam
<Luke> aren't you worried about missing opportunities to mortgage
your penis?

A. S. Bradbury

9/18/2006 11:46:00 AM

On Sunday 17 September 2006 21:11, Edward wrote:
> So I currently have resorted to JEdit which is a good general purpose
> editor but not specifically for Ruby.

I'm assuming you have discovered Robert Mckinnon's Ruby JEdit plugin?
http://ruby...

> What free editors for Ruby are there which have debugging,
> intellisense, syntax coloring and the regular macros, etc.? What do you
> guys use?

I'm really settling in nicely to vim7. If you just want vim's nice
indentation, coloring and so on, cream (http://cr...) provides a very
easy to use configuration. However, there's a lot to be gained by taking the
time to configure vim to act just as you want it.

This series of configuring Vim for perl developers gives a good run-through of
the most important configuration variables you might consider tweaking to
your taste:
http://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/2004/05/10/vim-for-perl-d...

The only aspect of vim that put me off at first was editing multiple files, it
didn't seem very intuitive. However, I've found minibufexplorer (search it on
vim.org) to be just what I've been looking for. I'd reccomend setting a
mapping (ctrl-n, ctrl-p in standard mode perhaps, or shift-right and left if
they're not already taken by your console) to move between tabs (just map the
keys to :bn and :bp). Also, it's handy to make sure you read just a little
bit about buffers in vim and its windowing system. Oh, also add 'set hidden'
to your vimrc, or else buffers are unloaded each time you switch and. Lots
more hints are available on vim.org.

Hope this adds a couple of alternatives

Alex

Alexandru E. Ungur

9/18/2006 12:32:00 PM

>>> sender: "A. S. Bradbury" date: "Mon, Sep 18, 2006 at 08:46:28PM +0900" <<<EOQ
> On Sunday 17 September 2006 21:11, Edward wrote:
> > So I currently have resorted to JEdit which is a good general purpose
> > editor but not specifically for Ruby.
>
> I'm assuming you have discovered Robert Mckinnon's Ruby JEdit plugin?
> http://ruby...
>
> > What free editors for Ruby are there which have debugging,
> > intellisense, syntax coloring and the regular macros, etc.? What do you
> > guys use?
>
> I'm really settling in nicely to vim7. If you just want vim's nice
> indentation, coloring and so on, cream (http://cr...) provides a very
> easy to use configuration. However, there's a lot to be gained by taking the
> time to configure vim to act just as you want it.
>
> This series of configuring Vim for perl developers gives a good run-through of
> the most important configuration variables you might consider tweaking to
> your taste:
> http://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/2004/05/10/vim-for-perl-d...
>
> The only aspect of vim that put me off at first was editing multiple files, it
> didn't seem very intuitive.
Well, since you mention that, indeed that was a sore spot for myself
as well until recently. I missed the ease of working with files that
I experienced in Komodo for example (ability to organize them into
projects, etc.).
However a couple of days ago I discovered "Project"[1] which made me
100% satisfied with my Vim setup. It's a really great plugin, and the
files management has become as pleasant as it can be now :)

Cheers,
Alex

[1] http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?sc...

Jeff Schwab

9/18/2006 1:55:00 PM

James Britt wrote:
> Edward wrote:
>> ... What free editors for Ruby are there which have debugging,
>> intellisense, syntax coloring and the regular macros, etc.? What do you
>> guys use?
>
> Vim 7.

+1

Runner up: XEmacs.

OP: Keep in mind that each flavor of vi or emacs has its own philosophy.
E.g., I use Vim (or GVim) most of the time, but Calvin when I need
something that fits in a few KB and runs in DOS low memory. Find a
flavor that works for you. Mega-IDEs (particularly Eclipse) can be nice
for working on very large projects over a long period of time, but when
they go down for any reason, you can really get hosed.

David Vallner

9/23/2006 1:22:00 PM

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Edward wrote:
> What free editors for Ruby are there which have debugging,
> intellisense, syntax coloring and the regular macros, etc.? What do you
> guys use?
>

So, after the regular text editor plugs from people that didn't quite
read what you wanted - more on the side of a light IDE than an editor.
(No, I don't consider being able to spawn the ruby text debugger in a
shell that shows up in an actual feature.)

As far as I know, intellisense for Ruby isn't. To implement it would
require a Ruby parser that's more complex in certain situations than the
one the ruby interpreter uses. (As a side note, I hate the VSism
"intellisense", since it's the only name for autocompletion that doesn't
hint you to what the feature does. Doubleplus buzzwordy newspeak.)

EasyEclipse seems to offer not quite the newest versions of the related
plugins, you're better off using the main RDT and RadRails update sites.

They -should- offer debugging though if I read the project websites
right - although RadRails does an even better job than hiding the
feature breakdown from you than Komodo.

Komodo might be another option, it worked very well for me with Python.
However, from when I briefly tried it, they had Ruby support mostly to
"go with the flow" - not quite the full feature list was implemented for
Ruby.

Vim WILL break your brain horribly if you're used to other editor types,
and if you're fine with Eclipse or jEdit, I doubt there's anything to be
gained wasting your time on editor-hopping.

David Vallner*
*(May not include actual pragmatism.)
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Huw Collingbourne

9/23/2006 2:37:00 PM

"David Vallner" <david@vallner.net> wrote in message
news:451534D3.9000100@vallner.net...
> So, after the regular text editor plugs from people that didn't quite
> read what you wanted - more on the side of a light IDE than an editor.
> (No, I don't consider being able to spawn the ruby text debugger in a
> shell that shows up in an actual feature.)
>
> As far as I know, intellisense for Ruby isn't. To implement it would
> require a Ruby parser that's more complex in certain situations than the
> one the ruby interpreter uses.

This is pretty close to the truth. We are developing IntelliSense currently
for Ruby In Steel. It is easy to do 'dumb' IntelliSense (dropdown lists of
members that 'might' be relevant to the current class or object) but
incredibly complicated to do 'intelligent' IntelliSense - that is, to supply
methods appropriate to the current object and scope, taking into account the
complexities of modules and mixins, access levels, inheritence and so on.

We decided at the outset that we would provide the intelligent variety of
IntelliSense - and that has indeed meant writing a complex parser which is,
to be honest, almost a Ruby interpreter in itself. Having done this, it does
provide us with a huge amount of information which can be used for all kinds
of useful operations in addition to IntelliSense (some of which we have not
yet announced) - so, on the whole, I think the effort has been worthwhile
;-)

best wishes
Huw Collingbourne
http://www.sapphir...
Ruby Programming In Visual Studio 2005

Gavin Kistner

9/23/2006 2:49:00 PM

Edward wrote:
> What free editors for Ruby are there which have debugging,
> intellisense, syntax coloring and the regular macros, etc.? What do you
> guys use?

No offense, but please search the mailing list/newsgroup archive for
your answer to this question. This comes up once every few months (or
more frequent). There are many very, very long threads about the 'best'
editor for various platforms, and the features you describe.

That said: TextMate is my personal choice. It doesn't do what you
describe wanting, but it does what you really want. :) James' amusing
description of TextMate as a teaser for his book[1] is pretty accurate:

"With TextMate you can do your normal work, but signal the
ever-watchful ninjas as you go. At your command, they will launch into
action, slicing through text, building repetitive structures of data in
the blink of an eye, and much more. They will even post to your blog,
handle your IRC conversations, and read your email."

[1] http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles...

comp.lang.ruby

what is the best ruby editor?

Edward

khaines

James Britt

Huw Collingbourne

Tassilo Horn

A. S. Bradbury

Alexandru E. Ungur

Jeff Schwab

David Vallner

Huw Collingbourne

Gavin Kistner

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