The following is a just a dump of my notes gathered over the last 7
weeks as I hopped from IDE to IDE in search of the perfect IDE for
RoR. Unfortunately, there isn’t one… and the perfect one would be
made up of different features from all three. I concede that a number
of the gripes below are are of a general nature and not specific to
RoR… but I thought I’d just dump my notes here as they may be of
interest to somebody about to embark on a similar IDE tour.
Generally speaking, NetBeans has the most complete support for RoR…
with code navigation, auto-complete etc. … but IntelliJ is the most
superior all-round editor. Eclipse is literally in between.
- NetBeans gripes…
+Howto set keymap for “go to file” to Ctl+Shift+N ? … can’t find “go
to file” in the keymaps
screen… will concentrate instead on howto import my intellij keymap
+does nb have a similar feature as “scroll to source” in intellij? …
James has pointed out the
“select in” from the editor window popup … but still looking for an
options to have the navigator
pane and editor pane always in sync
::>gave up on NetBeans…
trying out IntelliJ’s Ruby support after a few key things missing
driving me nuts in NetBeans…
- autoscroll to source
- expand selection from cursor … ctrl+w
- paste from clipboard history … ctrl+shift+insert
- Open File support not as good as intellij (which itself is not
ideal)… the problem is that there
are so many files with the same name in a rails app … eg,
“show.html.erb” … which NetBeans will
give you a result list of mammoth proportions … IntelliJ allows you
to specify (for example)
foo_bars\show … which narrows down the search result
dramatically … It would be even better
however if it allowed us to do barshow or even *bars\show because in
our app there are just
so many entities that are named foo_…
-
moved to IntelliJ plus Ruby plugin
-
svn hell … upgraded tortise to 1.5 and did svn up … only to find
that svn integration via IDEA
stopped working … complaining about the client being too old… -
much pain and suffering whilst moving from IDEA to Eclipse … the
keymappings don’t all seem to take …
(eg, Ctrl+W for select… ) … and svn integration is crap compared to
IDEA … but IDEA is pre 1.5 so
cannot go back now anyway -
eclipse gripes…
- doesn’t have copy-from-clipboard-history or whatever intellij calls
it - collapse all does not work in x_spec.rb … does not collapse
“describe” or “it” blocks - does not have unnamed or even just numbered bookmarks … they all
need to have a name and are project-scope, not page scope - invoking synchronize forces change of perspective … should be able
to sync from within the RadRails/Ruby perspective
- try NetBeans again … gripes:
- cannot search keymapping easily to allow modify… eg, I could right-
click in editor and Select In -> Projects but if I wanted that
keymapped I could not easily find it in the keymapping dialog. I
tried modifying some other keymap to the same keys so’s to get a clue
from the key clash error message but all I got was “already assigned
to Select Node in Projects action” … which gave me no clue as to
the fact it resided under Window -> Window/Select Document In - keymapping to run rb file does not work repeatedly, and when via
mouse a new tab is opened for each invocation - svn integration not as good as intellij
- Ruby debugger … check again what is available in IntelliJ … may
have to go back to NetBeans?
::>The Eclipse debugger does not work for jruby … ruby only … and
our app no longer works with ruby only
now that we have dependencies/imports on/of java code
::>NetBeans debugger is is really, really slow … but at least it
works.
::>Ruby debugging to be supported in IntelliJ in september