By a Newbie, for Newbies.
I’m trying to get started with Ruby development, and have just spent a
couple of days looking for an IDE. In my googling, I came across this
forum several times, so it seems to be a good for posting my
experiences. I apologise for the long post, but it does seem to be
relevant.
My background - 20 years experience, with a mix of Linux and Windows.
I’m Currently profficient with Visual Studio, and was once profficient
with emacs. I can do simple tasks with vi. I have also used several
IDE’s in addition to Visual Studio - such as Oracle JDeveloper and
Delphi.
My favourite IDE to date - Visual Studio 2003/5, for it’s good looks,
lightning response, intellisense, code completion, integration of
different languages, code navigation, good window organisation, … in
short, because it offers a huge range of features within a well
structured and light feeling UI.
If there were a Ruby plugin for Visual Studio, I would have gone
straight to that, and been willing to pay, say, $200 for it, but there
isn’t, so I went on a great Ruby editor hunt.
The hunt
After several days of massive googling, downloading, and configuring, I
discovered that there is no product which comes close to being a “Ruby
for Visual Studio”, but the best overall, and quite usable, was
Arachnoruby. At $29, for the non-commercial version, it’s not free, but
is cheap.
I will give a run-down of all the editors and IDE’s I tried. Most of
these I would have found to be an acceptable Ruby editor, however there
was always something which made Arachnoruby preferable, and worth paying
$29 for. Obviously, I may have done an injustice to any of these, and
missed an important quality. In that case, I apologise and am happy to
be corrected. Nevertheless, in my 2 days of looking for a Ruby editor, I
had to go on first impressions, and Arachnoruby the one I kept coming
back to.
I am running an AMD 2800, with 750 MB of RAM. I dual boot Windows XP,
and Xandros Linux.
- Free general editors, plugins needed…
eclipse - The only one of the “free, plus plugin” tools where the plugin
could be located and installed with a wizard. It did take me some failed
attempts to achieve this, but I put that down to my unfamiliarity with
eclipse. RoR support is in development, which is a big plus. The Ruby
plugin seemed to work nicely, but didn’t do “as you type” indentation.
It does provide “formatting”, on a keystroke, but “as you type”
indentation is worth a lot to me. The other Ruby features were nice, but
not as important to me as the indentation.
jedit - couldn’t get it running in Xandros. I have used it in the past
in Windows.
My overall impression of Java based editors (eclipse, jedit) is that the
“look” is good, and sometimes “great”, but the “feel” is sluggish. They
would have to have very strong Ruby support to make me prefer them to a
“lighter” editor.
emacs - an old favourite of mine, but I’ve used fully graphical IDE’s
for too long to want to go back to it’s keystroke based command set. To
me, it is easier to think about a program when you are not thinking
about how to navigate the editor. The plugin seemed to work quite nicely
for indentation, but I didn’t get syntax highlight working. I assume
that the auto-complete function is just the old emacs one of looking for
words in the current file. I believe that emacs is (or was) the
preferred editor of the the Ruby “owners”, so it must offer a lot to
those willing to invest the time.
Vim -From the net buzz Ruby support seems to be mature, and while I
enjoy vim for small tasks, I’ve never used it for serious programming. A
quick look at the instructions for installing Ruby support (only for the
dedicated) was enough to make me move on to more promising (for me)
products.
gedit - Slow, in Xandros. Perhaps this is because it is a Gnome app
running on a KDE desktop. The Ruby plugin mentioned on the net didn’t
seem to have enough to recommend it to make it worthwhile trying.
cream - Some Ruby support “out of the box”. It provided nice syntax
highlight, and an “auto-indent” option (but this didn’t work for me). It
is nice and light, being vim based, and is switchable between GUI and
raw VIM mode. It seemed worth more investigating.
- A cross platform, pure Ruby editor
FreeRIDE - Overall, very good, and promises more. Automatic indentation
is adequate, but not complete. The integration of interpreter, debugger
and Ruby manuals is there, but not as well organised (to my eye), as in
Arachnoruby. Recommended.
SciITE - A nice place to start. It is light and clean, and does syntax
highlighting and basic indentation (as per FreeRIDE) but just doesn’t do
very much as a Ruby editor.
- KDE based
I love the look and feel of KDE applications, so I would have been keen
to get Ruby working in one of these…
kate - A very nice programmers editor. It was difficult to locate and
install the Ruby plugins, and when I did they were adequate, but seemed
to only provide syntax highlighting. No auto-indent, or other strong
Ruby support.
kdevelop - couldn’t install it on Xandros
Quanta - It installed first time with an “apt-get” in Xandros. A truely
beautiful editor! I couldn’t get any Ruby support running though.
However, I might be using it for HTML in the future, and if it gets good
Ruby support, then I’ll be having another look.
- Did not try -
slickedit
komodo
Both of these are mature, cross language, cross platform editors, with
“add-ons” for Ruby. Both are expensive, and after looking at the feature
sets, and reviews, I couldn’t see any reason to try them when
Arachnoruby seemed to match them (for Ruby development) at $29.
- My winner, Arachnoby
Works out of the box! It has Ruby syntax highlighting, very nice “as you
type” indentation, debugger, live syntax checking. The default colour
scheme is garish, but an alternative scheme can be selected. The
auto-complete function is basic - it just looks for identifiers within
the current file. This, however, is as good as any I found during my
investigation. It’s still in beta - version 0.6.5, so some of the
features are only stubs, but the stubs seem to be in the right place,
and look promising for a great Ruby IDE. Arachno uses a cross platform
widget set, which has some drawbacks. The “look” is reasonably modern
and graphical, but not as sharp as it could be - KDE and Windows both
look better. The “feel” is as responsive as a native application.
So, I can only go on first impressions, but the first impression of
Arachnoruby was the best of all. In addition, longtime users on the net
praise it.
So, my recommendations…
-
If you are a heavy user of emacs, jedit, vim, kate, kdevelop
etc…then find the Ruby plugin for you. However, you probably wouldn’t
be looking here anyway.
-
FeeRIDE is a good place to start for anyone else.
-
Arachnoruby is, in my humble, and not very well informed opinion, the
best of them all for someone looking for a new IDE, and well worth $29
A final note: I was looking for a Linux editor, in Xandros, which is
Debian based. Arachnoruby is cross platform, but the Windows version is
ahead of the others. I decided to continue with version 0.5.6 in Linux,
rather than version 6.5 in windows. My first attempt at running 6.5 with
Cross-Over office didn’t succeed. I’ll try again later, but for the
moment I’ve had enough of installing and configuring, and want to get on
with Ruby coding!
