[ANN} Komodo 3.5.1 -- a professional Ruby IDE

Ruby
61

I’d take a look at Komodo. I’m not sure how much it costs, but when
I tried the trial version I was pretty impressed.

I’m looking forward to trying out the VS2005 plugin once that becomes
available. I especially think it could be a strong environment for
Ruby development once the .NET Ruby compiler makes an appearance.
http://www.plas.fit.qut.edu.au/rubynet/

62

On 4/17/06, Roy S. [email protected] wrote:

Did you try RadRails[1] out? I realize that it’s built upon Eclipse but
it does have the benefit of being a stand-alone product that bundles
everything you need for Ruby and Rails development.

[1] http://www.radrails.org/

I’ll second that. I just started using RadRails a few weeks ago, and I
am impressed.

Curt

63

You twice mention ‘reading the stack trace’ in Java. That only helps if you
HAVE a stack trace. Many bugs don’t involve exceptions.

Yes logic bugs, where the outcome isn’t as expected, but these should be
able to be covered with a unit test. I admit that in a complex system,
sometimes you get to the state where the only way to test something is
to construct a very large integration test simply to determine what is
wrong - this basically points you towards refactoring, as a system where
nothing can be tested without massive investment in infrastructure is
not capable of being tested properly

I’m all for unit
tests, but sometimes a debugger is faster.

I think we’ll disagree on this one - which is fine :slight_smile:

Kev

64

I’m confused as to why people think there’s some sort of conflict
between
using a debugger and unit testing. Those tests don’t write themselves
bug-free on pass one; having a debugger would be very useful when you’re
figuring out why they’re failing.

I’d agree that the debugger comes out of the toolbox less frequently,
but
it’s still there and it’s still useful.

  • James
65

James M. wrote:

I’m confused as to why people think there’s some sort of conflict
between
using a debugger and unit testing. Those tests don’t write themselves
bug-free on pass one; having a debugger would be very useful when you’re
figuring out why they’re failing.

I’d agree that the debugger comes out of the toolbox less frequently,
but
it’s still there and it’s still useful.

  • James

Reading this I just realied I haven’t fired up a debugger in well over a
year =/

66

I find most text editors out there to be abysmal. That said, here are
my opinions on some of the more popular text editors (addressing
Linux and also Mac since that platform has been disregarded so far
and I know some might appreciate the info if they haven’t yet tried
the two Mac-specific editors I review).

Cross-Platform CLI:
vim: Pretty nice, but you have to be willing to learn how to get
around. Has a lot of navigation shortcuts, but there is a lack of
language-sensitive shortcuts.
emacs: I admit to not having used emacs very much, but it appears
that there are tons of shortcuts that would be very helpful. I
haven’t personally seen enough experts zooming through the emacs
interface for it to have gained much of my interest at all.

Linux GUI:
gedit: Just a typical text editor. Nothing too special in my book.
Lacks the ability to automagically update if the file is altered by
some external process. Not sure about Ruby highlighting; I’ve mostly
used this for other languages.
kwrite: Also typical, but has one up over gedit in my book in that
it will update to the latest version of the file written to disk if
it is changed. Very beneficial since I use version management. Like
gedit, I don’t recall programming in Ruby in kwrite.

Mac GUI:
SubEthaEdit: Has most features anybody cares about for a lightweight
text editor. Great syntax highlighting, fast code completion built in
using Cocoa’s excellent autocompletion feature, doesn’t get in the
way, automatic update to latest version of file. Also, it has a
wonderful peer collaboration feature allowing many people to work on
the same file locally or remotely at the same time with real-time
updates. This is probably nicest for pairs of developers working
together, but larger groups probably would find collaboration in this
way inefficient.
TextMate: My personal favorite. Way too many features to list here.
Great macros and snippets (all easily programmable), support for tons
of languages (even languages embedded into other languages like the
Ruby inside an rhtml file), and even some excellent project
management and version control system support. The sheer number of
features feels a bit more medium-weight than I am used to in other
editors, but it performs pretty nicely overall.

Obviously, I recommend that anybody who has a Mac check out TextMate
and SubEthaEdit; at least one of the two is sure to satisfy, as they
tackle two extremely different ends of the spectrum.

  • Jake McArthur
67

On Monday 17 April 2006 10:09 pm, Jake McArthur wrote:

Linux GUI:
gedit: Just a typical text editor. Nothing too special in my book.
Lacks the ability to automagically update if the file is altered by
some external process. Not sure about Ruby highlighting; I’ve mostly
used this for other languages.
kwrite: Also typical, but has one up over gedit in my book in that
it will update to the latest version of the file written to disk if
it is changed. Very beneficial since I use version management. Like
gedit, I don’t recall programming in Ruby in kwrite.

I like nedit. It does recognize when a file (on disk) is altered by
some
other process and offers to open it. I’m not sure I’d want it to open
it
automagically. Has macros, syntax highlighting, can record keystrokes
to
create macros. Doesn’t directly support folding, but I and several
others
have written pseudo-folding macros for various purposes. (Mine are for
folding TWiki marked up text.)

Randy K.

68

I’ve been programming on Unix variants for 20 years and Linux for five
years and I don’t even know how to use the debugger! The last time I
actually used a debugger of any mind was, if memory serves me correctly,
in the late 1970s on a Xerox OS.

Actually, I don’t write unit tests either … but that is something I
intend to change now that I have a language and environment that
supports them. :slight_smile:

Michael G. wrote:

it’s still there and it’s still useful.

  • James

Reading this I just realied I haven’t fired up a debugger in well over a
year =/

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

69

John M. Gabriele wrote:

You can find the Ruby syntax highlighting patterns for NEdit here:
NEDit.org - Netticasinot ja rahapelit - Rahapelit netissä
(Instructions for how to install them are in that file at the top.)

See also

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby_nedit/

(and I’ve improved that a bit since then, if you’re interested)

70

Sanju Nath wrote:

… but when I try to debug a ruby file, I get this message:

ruby 1.8.4 debugger listens on port 2107

The RDT debugger doesn’t work with Ruby 1.8.4. It works with 1.8.2. (I
wasted a half day discovering this.) See
http://rubyeclipse.mktec.com/cgi-bin/trac.py/ticket/81

Some have pointed out that Eclipse can be configured to use one Ruby
interpreter for normal runs and another for debugging runs. This works
to some extent – if you’re using plain Ruby. OTOH, if you’re using
something like Ruby Tk, then it becomes more challenging (PITA) to get
it to use the right version of Ruby with the right version of the
dependency and the right version of the .so library to do the interface.

I haven’t decided whether to rollback to 1.8.2. If I stay with 1.8.4,
I’ll still use Eclipse for most work and I’ll use “ruby -rdebug” should
I need to use a debugger. If debugging gets too hairy, I’ll buy a copy
of Komodo or Arachno.

71

BTW, I’ve been using Kumodo IDE for ruby for the past one month, and it
seems to be an easy, intuitive lightweight interface for ruby.

However, the reason I went there was 'cos I wasn’t able to get the
eclipse
plugin debugger to work.

I keep trying to use rubypeople plugin which is a prereq to using the
radrails plugin, but when I try to debug a ruby file, I get this
message:

ruby 1.8.4 debugger listens on port 2107

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual
way.
Please contact the application’s support team for more information.

Any hints. I’ve reinstalled eclipse, ruby twice now, but no resolution.

Thanks for any hints.

72

Jake McArthur wrote:

I find most text editors out there to be abysmal. That said, here are
my opinions on some of the more popular text editors (addressing
Linux and also Mac since that platform has been disregarded so far
and I know some might appreciate the info if they haven’t yet tried
the two Mac-specific editors I review).

[…vim, emacs, gedit, kwrite, SubEthaEdit, TextMate…]

Thanks Jake, that complements my roundup nicely, and thanks to Mark
(Komodo) and Roy and Curt (RadRails). You’ve put up some more good info
for anyone looking for a Ruby IDE/Editor.

I have one correction to my first post. I’ve checked Quanta again, and
found that it does do Ruby syntax highlighting, and basic indentation
“out of the box”. It looks to be very strong for HTML, and has a great
KDE look and feel.

To anyone hitting this on a web search, good luck with your choice!

Javaman

73

— Randy K. [email protected] wrote:

I like nedit. It does recognize when a file (on disk) is altered by some
other process and offers to open it. I’m not sure I’d want it to open it
automagically. Has macros, syntax highlighting, can record keystrokes to
create macros. Doesn’t directly support folding, but I and several others
have written pseudo-folding macros for various purposes. (Mine are for
folding TWiki marked up text.)

Randy K.

I like NEdit pretty well. It has almost everything you’d want except for
a
class/method browser, a GUI debugger, and font anti-aliasing (uses
bitmapped X
fonts). Note that it’s strictly X11-based. Besides on GNU/Linux, I’ve
used it
on a Mac (with Apple’s X11) and on Windows (with Cygwin’s X) and it
worked fine
for me. It’s got its own “macro language” that looks pretty simple.

You can find the Ruby syntax highlighting patterns for NEdit here:

(Instructions for how to install them are in that file at the top.)

Looking into FreeRIDE presently.