Finding a Ruby IDE

Recently I've spent some time revisiting and learning more about Ruby on Rails. In doing so I wanted a decent editor to work with.  This article is about my "adventure" in finding an editor and/or IDE that I could use in exploring and learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails and ultimately what I ended up selecting.

Everything I read online talked about TextMate the editor of choice for Mac Ruby developers. I have a Windows machine so I didn't have that option. I decided to stick close to home by seeing if IntelliJ (my favorite Java editor) had a plug-in that supported Ruby. At the time no such plug-in existed. I gave SciTE and FreeRIDE (the editors that come with the Ruby distribution) a spin but wanted something a little closer to what I was use to in a Java IDE. I remember hearing something about RadRails, a Ruby IDE based on Eclipse. I was familiar enough with Eclipse so I decided to use that for my dabbling. I used this for a while and it was OK for what I was doing.

In the meantime I came across a Windows TextMate-like editor called "e". I first installed a beta version of "e" which stands for the "E Text Editor ". I spent some time trying to make this editor work for me. I wanted to see what all the excitement was about in the TextMate world, even if it was on Windows :-) . To use "e" I first needed an updated installation of cygwin since "e" relies on cygwin to function. I wasn't overly pleased that "e" relied on cygwin to be a functional editor. Nevertheless I installed a recent copy of cygwin and was up and running with "e". "e" is in beta and with beta software comes annoyances and partially functional software. I really wanted to make this editor work.  However, I ran in to a few bugs that prohibited me from using "e" and caused me to resume using RadRails. About this time, the IntelliJ folks released a Ruby plug-in.

The IntelliJ plug-in worked fairly well for what I needed. I could use it in an environment that I was very familiar with and was happy to be "home". Initially I experienced some minor bugs. The biggest problem I had was the plug-in can only be used in IntelliJ 6+ and I currently run 5.1 and wasn't prepared to upgrade. Unlike other editors I had looked at IntelliJ is relatively more expensive.  After my 30 day license expired, I headed back to RadRails, but then I ran in to this blog post about the future of RadRails:

"The bottom line to all of this is that Matt and I can't provide the same kind of commitment that we once could. Like or not, RadRails is not a business. We've been working our asses off on a start-up for the past few months and RadRails has suffered as a result. I wish things were different and we could sit back and work on open source all day but that is just not the reality anymore."

I wanted to use software where I felt there was community support. I continued my search to see what else was available. I came across InType, a very basic editor that is suppose to be TextMate-like, however, at the time of the writing they were still in an alpha version and didn't seem to have much momentum. At the time I used the software it was still very immature (e.g. no tab support though you can open multiple windows). Then one day I read a blog entry about Ruby support in NetBeans. IÕd always associated NetBeans with the so-so Java IDE currently produced by Sun.

I downloaded a milestone release of NetBeans release 6 and installed support for Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Almost instantly I was wowed by their support for Ruby and Rails. I had no trouble becoming productive with the IDE and have been happy with the product since.  Current features include:

• Code completion
• Occurrence highlighting
• Integrated documentation pop-ups for Ruby API calls
• Parameter completion
• Mongrel support
• Rake migrations
• And much more

Additionally, NetBeans supports development in either the reference implementation of Ruby or in JRuby, a Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter.  Most recently the NetBeans folks have begun adding support for TextMate bundles. They have also created a stripped down version of the IDE that is strictly for Ruby coding (though this still seems a little rough around the edges). As you can see the NetBeans folks are really putting forth a great deal of effort to create a solid, robust IDE for creating Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications. While the RadRails IDE is now supported by Aptana and IntelliJ 7 will include built in Ruby support (release expected by the end of the year), NetBeans has made a big leap ahead of the rest of the pack and nothing appears to be getting in their way. For now NetBeans is the choice for me when doing Ruby development.

Update: I forgot to mention this recent IDE comparison of NetBeans, IntelliJ and RadRails.