I use netbeans - very happy with it. Am stuck using Windows and can’t
stand ‘e’, even though I did buy a licence for it (has no bookmarks so
going from one part of a file to another means you lose your thread of
thought). Netbeans does sit on top of a Java VM but has lots of
shortcut keys and 90% of the TextMate subsitution macros. It can be a
little flakey but so is ‘e’ so so what?
I use VIM for stuff like column editing of data and proper regexp
substitution.
For me TextMate is a text-based word processing tool with a lot of
stuff bolted on, but I’m looking at it through ‘e’ shaped glasses so
that’s probably unfair.
If you can’t split the screen for the same file or put two files side
by side or be able to do diffs from your sourcecode control system
it’s not a proper IDE, sorry, not IMHO.
I also use cygwin for X terminals and shell programming (usually using
VIM to edit).
It’s been 30 years, and I still haven’t found anything better than
EMACS.
Dear older-fart-than-me,
How’s the carpal tunnel these days? Mine’s fine, thanks for asking.
I use a Kinesis Classic ergonomic keyboard, which has two big buttons
conveniently located under each thumb. It’s programmable, so I
remapped the buttons under the left thumb to Control and Alt. This
takes all the strain out of typing control and alt keyboard shortcuts.
I have the most problem with the mouse, and this leads me to reject
editors that don’t allow me to create keyboard shortcuts for almost
everything.
Netbeans: ^K finds the nearest completion across all buffers, Shift-^K
goes back. ^B takes you to the definition of the function or variable
you are sitting on.
Vim: ^P and ^N.
Completion - you can set up completions in Netbeans - press tab and it
completes or does a whole macro for you. Also does the Java IDE thing
of trying to guess what function you want, plus in-line help … You’d
have to write all that yourself in emacs - why bother?
Vim: look for the help on abbrev …
Keyboard macros to put in underscore - any editor that supports
macros …
You don’t have to write a function to do the word completion in emacs
it’s a standard function. Personally don’t find emacs that easy to
customise. Got up to speed by working throught the O’Reilly book but
couldn’t find a decent tutorial on e-lisp. Things like colorising text
are really easy in VIM and Netbeans - Emacs buries it somewhere and I
couldn’t get it working the way I wanted - too clever for its own
good. Then stopped using it for a while and forgot all of the commands
apart from ^X^C. I was writing a lot of PL/SQL and really liked being
able to run SQL*Plus in a subwindow.
It’s all a question of are you willing to invest the energy to get as
good with Netbeans are you are with Emacs - probably not. But the
customisation is much easier than with Emacs for a newbie, and it
works as advertised.
One thing that I really don’t like about NetBeans is the use of two
spaces for indentation. I have all of my indentation engines set to
4 space tabs, which sort of works. When I am at the beginning of the
line and hit the tab key, it will insert a 4 space tab like I expect
it to. But if the line begins with two spaces, such as one that was
created by a generator, then the tab key doesn’t always insert a 4
space tab. And the smart indenting (the indentation after pressing
the return/enter key) does not use my indentation settings but rather
the two spaces. I did some searching on it and apparently Ty (the
primary author) is of the opinion that tabs are evil, so I feel like
I’m forced to use what he thinks is best instead of what I am more
comfortable with.
I don’t mean this to start a discussion about which is better, spaces
or tabs. I’m just pointing out something that I don’t like about
NetBeans. And it’s enough to keep me using TextMate. When I open a
file in TextMate, I CMD-A, OPT-CMD-[ and the entire file is formatted
just the way I want it. I tried to do that in NetBeans and I
couldn’t escape the two space indents!
If there is a way to correct this, please (please) tell me. I
actually find quite a bit to like in NetBeans, but I’m pretty adamant
about the 4 space tab thing.
Netbeans: ^K finds the nearest completion across all buffers, Shift-^K
goes back. …
You pointed out some featues of NetBeans that allow for limited
customization,
and pointed out some features that do something similar to what I
want, but haven’t
but haven’t answered my question: how does NetBeans support
customization in general?
How hard would it be to change the behavior of ordinary characters
like semicolon
to behave as I described: insert an underscore, unless the preceding
character is an underscore,
and in that case insert a semicolon?
I’m a quarter of the way through Agile, and so far I’ve tried a few
editors. NetBeans 6 seems fully featured, but I’m finding it clunky for
me. InType is light and clean but doesn’t have any code completion or
advanced features. I’m kind of looking for something in the middle.
Ideally I’d find something like HomeSite, which I love and has about the
right amount of features while staying out of your way. What else is out
there that works well for Ruby?
Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.
i think textmate, vim, emacs, netbeans, Aptana, and maybe komodo all
have happy users. Let me answer a different question. I believe
textmate is the best documented editor/IDe, with the Gray book and
literally hundreds of blogs about how to do anything (and the
occasional bug/gotcha). Look in delicios for tag “rails+textmate”.
I’m a quarter of the way through Agile, and so far I’ve tried a few
editors. NetBeans 6 seems fully featured, but I’m finding it clunky for
me. InType is light and clean but doesn’t have any code completion or
advanced features. I’m kind of looking for something in the middle.
Ideally I’d find something like HomeSite, which I love and has about the
right amount of features while staying out of your way. What else is out
there that works well for Ruby?
I like 3rdRail (http://www.codegear.com/products/3rdrail). In fact,
you’d have to pry it out of my dead, cold hands. It isn’t a free
editor, but it specifically targets Ruby/Rails development. There are
some extraordinary features in it. It’s only real draw-back is it
doesn’t have an integrated debugger yet, but CodeGear is adding one.
Tom, there are several threads here on the forum talking about IDEs.
Details about features various editors offer are available in those
threads, so I won’t re-iterate that information here.
Download 3rdRail and try using it. You can also go into the newsgroup
for 3rdRail and ask questions if you need further details.
VIM, prefer to have one editor not one for every task.
Then that’s what you’ve got in 3rdRail. It edits templates, style
sheets, code, and practically everything else from a single interface.
You can also execute shell commands from the editor. Code completion
works for shell commands, and if you’re installing gems, it actually
fetches a list of available gems for you live.
When you execute a script command, you can see the same results you’d
see in a shell window.
What I meant by directly targeting Ruby & Rails is the editor doesn’t
try and support PHP, Ruby, Java, C#, etc. It targets Ruby/Rails project
tasks directly. Most every task I can think of can be handled directly
from the IDE.
My $0.02 is that text mate is the best editor out there, but E text
editor is the best alternative for PC users. It even does multiple
panels/documents now! ( http://www.e-texteditor.com/ )
In e you can hold CTRL down while selecting and get multiple,
disconnected, selections. Is there a way to do that in TextMate?
Since this is getting off-topic, I’ll try to pull it back with: I
often need to select many things at once as I’m editing a view or
controller, and it would be helpful if I could do that.
I’ve recently updated the ‘vim-rails’ package for Ubuntu Gutsy which
installs the ‘vim-rails’ vim-script and a bunch of supporting scripts,
making Gvim and Vim more Rails friendly.
If you are interested you can find it in my Launchpad PPA archive here
I thought I saw something on your blogs about tabs being
evil…that’s where that line came from. Good to know that you don’t really think that tabs are at the root of everything wrong with the
world ;).
I’ll do some specific use cases and put together detailed notes for you.
On Dec 7, 5:06 am, Phillip K. [email protected] wrote:
I did some searching on it and apparently Ty (the
primary author) is of the opinion that tabs are evil, so I feel like
I’m forced to use what he thinks is best instead of what I am more
comfortable with.
Hi Phillip,
it’s true that I’m no fan of tabs but I assure you I’m not at all
trying to enforce a particular indentation style - tabs, spaces or
amount, on anyone. NetBeans has settings for all these things and they
are supposed to work; we had no bugs filed on them not working. (Well,
there is a new bug report that is 3 days old, so filed after 6.0
shipped, which looks related - http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=123496
I will be investigating. However, this bug report seems to be
talking specifically about ERB/RHTML files, which are special because
they combine lots of editor types into a single document - HTML,
JavaScript, Ruby etc. If you’re seeing something else (e.g. in plain
Ruby files), it would be very valuable if you can provide more
information on how to reproduce it. Just write to [email protected] so we don’t bore others on this alias with
NetBeans specific issues.
If there is a way to correct this, please (please) tell me. I
actually find quite a bit to like inNetBeans, but I’m pretty adamant
about the 4 space tab thing.
This should be easy to fix; all the infrastructure is in place for
this to work, and it did work when I first implemented it, so it’s
likely a simple bug. If should be able to fix it quickly in 6.1 if I
can reproduce it.
VIM, prefer to have one editor not one for every task.
Then that’s what you’ve got in 3rdRail. It edits templates, style
sheets, code, and practically everything else from a single interface.
You can also execute shell commands from the editor. Code completion
works for shell commands, and if you’re installing gems, it actually
fetches a list of available gems for you live.
When you execute a script command, you can see the same results you’d
see in a shell window.
What I meant by directly targeting Ruby & Rails is the editor doesn’t
try and support PHP, Ruby, Java, C#, etc. It targets Ruby/Rails project
tasks directly. Most every task I can think of can be handled directly
from the IDE.
Cody
Jeezus Aich Keeriest, and a license is $400! And it looks suspiciously
like Aptana or one of those Eclipse-based variants. No dice there.
I’ve been super happy with Textmate on my mac, and Netbeans on Windows.
I’d use Netbeans on my mac too, but it’s true - it’s a touch
resource-intensive and doesn’t work as smoothly as TM. But on Windows,
NB has become my first choice.
I tried Komodo Edit for a bit (the free version). It’s not bad at all,
but it’s a serious hog and pretty flaky. It’s also missing a lot of
what I consider basic text-editing features, like search-and-replace for
blocks of code (nope, you can’t do that with Komodo.)
Ideally I’d find something like HomeSite, which I love and has about the
right amount of features while staying out of your way. What else is out
there that works well for Ruby?
Omygod! There’s still another homesite user out there? I’m still using
my 5 year old version Homesite 5.0 and I just don’t ever want to switch
to another editor. It think it achieved the perfect number of
features/settings, whenit was bought and discontinued – the best thing
that ever happened to it, as it kind of froze it in 2002.
