The heavyweight option would be to to run Eclipse and use RadRails. Also
Kate (the KDE editor) is pretty nice. Another option is Scribes. It
doesnt
have tabs but is a text mate like editor. There is always gvim
I used RadRails and various other Eclipse-based IDEs for a while.
Eclipse as a development platform seems to suffer from performance
problems. Though it was running on a pretty powerful machine with more
than enough resources, Eclipse froze up several times per day of
development. I talked to other developers, working on different
workstations. The also encountered those problems.
As for RadRails specifically, I don’t see how that huge and cumbersome
Java development environment buys you much in return for performance
problems. At the time I tried it, and appearantly to this day, it didn’t
have code completion or any other intellisense or object browsing
capablities. I couldn’t find a major feature that RadRails had and the
much lighter GVim hadn’t. In fact, GVim had some of the missing code
completion features that RadRails lacked (though they’re still far from
perfect).
Vim runs on all platforms I know. It actually runs well on Windows. It’s
lean, fast, and very productive. The only downside I can see is the
nearly vertical learning curve right at the beginning. But all in all,
it seems a solid choice.
I used KDevelop on Kubuntu and I like it. It’s fast. The thing is it
doesn’t have autocomplete. Does GVim have autocomplete? Is GVim the
same as Vim?
GVim is the GUI version of Vim. Basically the same, but of course more
flexible UI since you’re not bound to the console and its discontents.
Since version 7 (G)Vim has a powerful new feature called Omni Complete,
that enables the addition intellisense and code completion features with
VimScript.
The Ruby and particularly Rails’ omni completion support still needs a
lot of tuning. Rails poses a formidable challenge for any code
completion implementation, because of how dynamic it is (think
ActiveRecord with its reliance on database table structure and all the
methods generated dynamically through #method_missing etc. But (G)Vim
still offers one of the most sophisticated Rails’ development
environments
currently, imho.
I had a bad time with ruby gems on Ubuntu. The package manger didn’t
have Ruby 1.8.5 and the latest patches that I needed so I tried
installing from source. The ruby install went seamlessly, but gems
would fail to run since it was looking for zlib libraries in the
default locations and Ubuntu had moved them.
I hope it gets ironed out because I like the OS. I never had a problem
developing on XP, but I’d prefer to be on linux.
I had a bad time with ruby gems on Ubuntu. The package manger didn’t
have Ruby 1.8.5 and the latest patches that I needed so I tried
installing from source. The ruby install went seamlessly, but gems
would fail to run since it was looking for zlib libraries in the
default locations and Ubuntu had moved them.
I hope it gets ironed out because I like the OS. I never had a problem
developing on XP, but I’d prefer to be on linux.
I had no problems installing rails on ubuntu Dapper Drake by following
the method here:
I haven’t tried the latest ubuntu Edgy but other people running Edgy
seem to have no problem using rails.
