What IDE, if any, do you use for Rails development?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Brooke Fujita on July 10, 2008 at 3:07pm

Hey, I am surprised that no one responded yet... So allow me start off in a very awkward manner with a link to one of Zed Shaw's blog rants (just scroll on down to Rumor Control). It is always refreshing to read what Zed has to say (taken with a huge grain of salt.

Ahem... but me? I was given a Dell Latitude to work on, and since I need to often use Microsoft Office, I just use the stock WinXP OS. I have yet to take a serious look at the new NetBeans 6.1, but I saw a video and it looked pretty good. But while I work on WinXP, I am accustomed to having access to the wonderful GNU tools, so I actually do a lot of coding (not just Ruby/Rails, but Python and Java as well) from the Linux emulation layer called Cygwin. Ruby, all my gems, my PostgreSQL database.. all on Cygwin. Funny thing is, I just use Eclipse as a simple text editor for the most part, but I do like the Subversion plugin. Still, I don't really need that with vim, svn, and everything else on Cygwin.

I also make a lot of use with Sun's VirtualBox virtual machine.

Er, but in conclusion: I will be soon spending more time with NetBeans, since I understand that there is close cooperation with the JRuby people, and I am very keen on learning more about scripting languages running on the Java Virtual Machine.

Permalink Reply by Stephen McMahon on July 10, 2008 at 3:56pm

Hi Booke, thanks for the reply! No question where Zed stands on eclipse, eh? :)

Actually, the first editor that I normally reach for for anything is vim. It does syntax highlighting for a variety of languages including Ruby. Here's a screenshot on my work laptop using the torte theme:

The problem is that I'm a major ruby noob and I was looking for the code completion crutch. I know that I'd learn it much better without it. I think that I enjoyed my job more when I was writing PERL code in an xterm than I do now writing C# in an IDE that is fatter than some OSs.

I'm going to have to check out VirtualBox. I don't want to pay for VMWare and I don't want to use VirtualPC, so this might be just right.

Permalink Reply by Brooke Fujita on July 10, 2008 at 4:22pm

Hey there Stephen, shouts back at you from Sapporo:

... and nice vim color configuration. Wish I knew more about that. I wanted to try something called zenburn, it looks very easy on the eyes, just like your vim settings, too.

About code completion: I totally hear you on that. Yes, it's a crutch, but I sure could use it (I only started programming Ruby/Rails professionally 9 months ago). And yeah, funny thing is, I always start off a new Rails project from Cygwin bash command line and vim.

About VirtualBox: yes, please do check it out. It's very good to be able to have access to complete OS's environments close at hand. At work and at home, I have got only WinXP, but I virtualize CentOS, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD. You can also go the other way, and virtualize Windows from Linux.

Permalink Reply by Stephen McMahon on July 10, 2008 at 4:44pm

And back to you from Colorado Springs! At least for the next day.5. I'm moving to Honolulu next week and I'm leaving here to drive my vehicle to LA to ship it to HNL and then catch a plane on Tuesday!

So far my Rails experience has been from the command line as well. I bought a book a while back called Agile Web Development with Rails and the instructions for creating an application were to hit the command line and type "rails demo".

For a while, my co-workers were tired of me going on and on about Ruby on Rails (It was payback for all the iPhone chatter). We are a C# shop and I used to think that creating a web application in C# was simple, but after my first experience with Ruby on Rails, my new opinion is that ASP.NET is complicated by comparison. They have a new effort called ASP.NET MVC, but it appears to be an attempt at doing what Rails is already doing.

The screen shot comes from the win32 version of vim from www.vim.org. The theme that it is using is out of the box, but I'm using Profont. If you are running vim on your pc, you can get this by adding the following to your _vimrc:

:colorscheme torte
set guifont=ProFontWindows:h9:cDEFAULT
au GUIEnter * simalt ~x

Couldn't tell you what that last line is, I've had this same vimrc for a very long time!

I've used the zenburn scheme for my VS.NET IDE but not yet for vi. If I recall, it is similar, but a little more toned down. The colors are not as stark as torte.

Permalink Reply by Daniel Leuck on July 10, 2008 at 4:55pm

I'm certainly not an expert, but I've played around with Aptana, which seems nice. Tim noticed that you can't use it with the Flex plugin, which is annoying, but you can always do two Eclipse installs.

Note: I've very familiar with Eclipse so I am biased toward IDEs built on top of the Eclipse platform.

Permalink Reply by Stephen McMahon on July 10, 2008 at 5:51pm

Ive used Aptana as well and I found that it works pretty well. I still drop out to the command line to use rake, etc., but for code completion and syntax hilighting it works very nicely. I think that once I have all of this moving behind me I'm going to find a rails friendly web hosting site and just build my web site on it so I can learn it better.

Permalink Reply by Stephen McMahon on July 25, 2008 at 6:46am

Ryan,

Thanks for the tips. I had to look up RSpec because I wasn't familiar with it. That actually looks like pretty interesting stuff! The vim plugins that you mentioned also sound very helpful. I didn't realize that there was a code completion plugin available. It makes more sense to me to use an enhanced vim rather than trying to make all of your other IDEs act like vim. I'll have to check into what is available for editing my C# sources in vim too.

Permalink Reply by Ryan on August 28, 2008 at 2:26pm

Just ran into Greg Hester, who's starting up a local Eclipse users group. I imagine the community is small enough so that you all likely know each other, but just in case, they're planning their first meetup for Sept. 16.

Permalink Reply by Greg Hester on August 29, 2008 at 8:39am

We are very excited to launch the Eclipse Hawaii User’s Group (eHug) here in Honolulu. Eclipse has been a lifesaver for me personally on many projects, saving both time and headaches. We have Java, Ruby and PHP developers in our group. We would welcome more Ruby folks. Come join us for our kickoff meeting on Sept 16th at IBM. Check out our page at for more information.

Ryan said:

Just ran into Greg Hester, who's starting up a local Eclipse users group. I imagine the community is small enough so that you all likely know each other, but just in case, they're planning their first meetup for Sept. 16.

Permalink Reply by Eric Nakagawa on September 15, 2008 at 3:51pm

mate + git + terminal on mah OSX... there is beauty, simplicity, syntax coloring and sex appeal!

Permalink Reply by Greg Hester on November 15, 2008 at 11:09am

Don't miss the Eclipse User's Group meeting this upcoming Tuesday night (11/18/08) over at the IBM building off Ala Moanna Blvd. Kevin English of Camber Corp will be giving us an overview of RoR using Aptana (Eclipse) --- An awesome IDE. We start at 5:30pm and Dinner provided by IBM. See the Featured Events on this site for more information.

Aloha!
Greg