What is the best ruby editor?

Ruby
1

I downloaded both the EasyEclipse for Ruby and the EasyEclipse for
Python at http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/index.html 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.tanguay.info

2

On Mon, 18 Sep 2006, 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?

It’s not free, but I am trying out Arachno Ruby right now (it has a free
trial period), and so far I like it a lot, and will probalby purchase it
when the trial period is over.

Of the free editors, I typically use vim or kdevelop.

Kirk H.

3

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 B.

“Inside every large system there’s a small system trying to get out”.
- Chet Hendrickson

4

“Edward” [email protected] 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/ri-emacs/
[2] http://www.rubyist.net/~rubikitch/computer/irbsh/index.en.html

5

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 C.

http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby P.ming In Visual Studio 2005

6

guys use?

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 :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Alex

[1] - : vim online

7

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. :slight_smile: 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/textmate/

8

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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 V.*
*(May not include actual pragmatism.)
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9

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://rubyjedit.org/

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://cream.sf.net) 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:

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

10

David V. wrote:

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.
The converse is true – if you’re used to Vim, it’s tough to break out
of the Vim mindset. My fingers have been doing “vi” since about 1986. I
should have learned Emacs but “they” told me it was a memory hog, so I
learned “vi”.

But I will throw in another “interesting” editor – Leo. It’s
essentially an outliner geared towards so-called “Literate Programming”.
It’s written in Python, though, so if the idea of large constrictors
around your lab bothers you, stay away from it.It’s also in a constant
state of flux – the author and a small community of users are
constantly tweaking it. But it can be used as a “light IDE” – the
essential structure of a document is XML, but you can “clone” nodes in
the tree to give a directed acyclic graph structure instead of just a
tree.

11

On 9/25/06, Huw C. wrote:

best wishes
Huw C.

http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby P.ming In Visual Studio 2005

Just wasted several clicks trying to find out how much a Visual Studio
license costs. Gave up eventually. The value of clever proprietary
IntelliSense is diminished if it’s so difficult to figure out how to
purchase it.

Rob

12

If you are interested in some of the issues involved in true (context
and
scope-correct) IntelliSense rather than just simple ‘completion lists’
(which many editors provide), you may be interested in this article
which
goes into some of the parsing problems we’ve had to solve in order to
implement the Ruby In Steel IntelliSense:

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/IntelliSense-in-depth

best wishes
Huw C.

http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby P.ming In Visual Studio 2005

13

Arthrogram wrote:

“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/textmate/

Well, gawrsh all hemlock, that sounds like just the most wonderful
editor! But tarnation – I don’t believe it runs on this here Linux
thingie, though … what’s a poor redneck geek like me to do?

Oh yeah … that darn Yankee emacs thang does that there stuff.

Yet another Rejected Ruby Book

Ruby P.ming for Redneck Geeks

“ever-watchful ninjas”?? Macs come with ninjas??

14

“Rob .” [email protected] wrote in message
news:[email protected]…

Just wasted several clicks trying to find out how much a Visual Studio
license costs. Gave up eventually. The value of clever proprietary
IntelliSense is diminished if it’s so difficult to figure out how to
purchase it.

I’m afraid we have nothing to do with how Microsoft sells Visual Studio
:wink:

However, the resellers are listed here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/

You can also buy VS in most big software stores, or online at places
such as
Amazon.
And for students there are substantial discounts:
http://www.microsoft.com/education/aerfind.aspx

To be honest, I guess that most of the people who are now using Ruby In
Steel are existing Visual Studio users who are moving to Ruby. That
said, we
have received quite a few emails from people who’ve told us that they
have
moved to Visual Studio specifically to use Ruby In Steel, so it works
both
ways, I guess…

best wishes
Huw C.

http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby P.ming In Visual Studio 2005

15

“David V.” [email protected] wrote in message
news:[email protected]…

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
:wink:

best wishes
Huw C.
http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby P.ming In Visual Studio 2005

16

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

David V. wrote:

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.
The converse is true – if you’re used to Vim, it’s tough to break out
of the Vim mindset. My fingers have been doing “vi” since about 1986. I
should have learned Emacs but “they” told me it was a memory hog, so I
learned “vi”.

I’ve hated vi since 1984 when I wrote a vi clone in VAX assembler, using
vi as my editor. I guess I was corrupted by WordStar before that :wink:

Emacs never really won me over either, despite me being a lisp junkie.

Actually, vi is useful when you have to ssh over a slow link, like a
GPRS modem.

Nedit[1][2] is a nice little editor, but it would be nicer if it were
better maintained and had a ruby scripting interface.

[1] http://www.nedit.org/
[2] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby_nedit/

17

“ever-watchful ninjas”?? Macs come with ninjas??

They don’t come with ninjas, but turning your mac into a fully
operational ninja training ground is easy. With a mac you’re a few
clicks away from boat loads of ninjas! Of course they don’t need
boats…they’re ninjas for crying out loud.

18

On Sep 23, 2006, at 10:45 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Macs come with ninjas??

Your computer didn’t come with Ninjas??? How ever do you get
anything done?!

James Edward G. II

19

On Sep 23, 2006, at 10:40 AM, James Edward G. II wrote:

On Sep 23, 2006, at 10:45 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Macs come with ninjas??

Your computer didn’t come with Ninjas??? How ever do you get
anything done?!

James Edward G. II

Ruby ninjas flip out and write code all the time!

-Ezra

20

Huw C. wrote:

“David V.” wrote

As far as I know, intellisense for Ruby isn’t.

This is pretty close to the truth. We are developing
IntelliSense currently for Ruby In Steel.

The jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin has had naive method completion
(intellisense) for about a year now.

It also has neat editor features for Ruby like integrated RDocs,
syntax error highlighting, auto indent and insert ‘end’ keyword,
structure browser, method navigation popup, and progressive selection.

The jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin is worth checking out if you want a light
Ruby editor with real editor features:
http://rubyjedit.org/

cheers,
Rob, jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin author