A few noob questions

Ruby
1

Hey guys, new here. :wink:

Tinkering w/ Ruby (on Windows), working through a book. So far for an
editor I’ve been using the free ConTEXT and SciTE. Anything better I’m
missing out on?

Also, any decent visual debuggers available? It would be helpful to be
able to walk through my code.

Thanks very much in advance,
Chris
http://www.pretenseofknowledge.com/

2

Well Notepad++ is a good general purpose editor on windows (I dont know
context). I liked ActiveState Komodo Edit too, which has a free version.

For serious code editing on Windows, the good visual editors are:

  • jruby based Redcar (free and really good)
  • Sublime Text 2 (in pre-2.0 and technically not free)
    both are cross platform, so swapping between UNIXes and MacOS will not
    leave you short on familiar tools.

Note for debugging in ruby most people use the plain old ruby-debug

On windows it should be already included in your Ruby version.

To use it, just add the method ‘debugger’ into your code

i.e.

def do_something
debugger unless everything_ok
thing_that_could_break
end

The debugger line will launch you into a REPL shell like IRB that lets
you
inspect your code in place. Visual Debuggers will feel like such a
straight
jacket afterwards. Used in conjunction with a gem like awesome_print
for
clean inspection of complex data, its a great way to debug.

Failing that, non-free Java IDEs like Ruby Mine may give you a
compelling
visual experience. Netbeans is good too, until Oracle booted Ruby
support
out of the roadmap and latest version. I haven’t used Eclipse in a
while,
but I imagine it is still compelling (but Netbeans was better for pure
Ruby
and related work), and there is also some work done on bringing Ruby
development into visual studio, though I have no 1st hand experience.

I am at a stage in my Ruby development where I want to break the
shackles
of the mouse, as a result I am doing a lot more Vim. Thats a path you
want
to try when you got someone to help you through though.

3

WOW, great info, thanks very much!

4

Aptana provides a nice Eclipse based IDE

Ruby (plus RoR and a lot of other stuff) is pre-configured
I haven’t played with debugging so not sure about that

cheers

5

On 11/1/12 15:57, “Chris Meisenzahl” [email protected] wrote:

Tinkering w/ Ruby (on Windows), working through a book. So far for an
editor I’ve been using the free ConTEXT and SciTE. Anything better I’m
missing out on?

Also, any decent visual debuggers available? It would be helpful to be
able to walk through my code.

If I were you, I’d go for looking at Sublime Text 2 & RubyMine for GUI
editors & vim/gvim otherwise which has excellent Ruby support along with
just about everything else you’ll ever need in an editor. All three are
cross-platform too.

Cheers,

Phil...
6

If I were you, I’d go for looking at Sublime Text 2 & RubyMine for
GUI editors & vim/gvim otherwise which has excellent Ruby support
along with just about everything else you’ll ever need in an editor

I’m a big fan of RubyMine. I really like the debugger.

Wayne

7

Chris H. wrote in post #1040392:

Aptana provides a nice Eclipse based IDE

Ruby (plus RoR and a lot of other stuff) is pre-configured
I haven’t played with debugging so not sure about that

cheers

Thanks, Chris. I’ll check that out, too.

8

Editra is a good free editor on Windows, with all standard features. it
even has a code browser for Ruby.

9

Thanks, Fred. And I see Submlime 2 just released a much improved version
today:
http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-build-2165

10

If you are looking for a Free IDE: Aptana trough all the way and for all
the ruby things.