IDEs, Text Editors, and Bears, Oh My!

When you are writing ruby code, you have quite a few options for your IDE, or text editor, or whatever you want to call it. Some have tons of features, some just have some syntax highlighting and code folding. Your IDE is super important to your workflow, and lets face it, Notepad just won't cut it anymore.

MacinText

My favorite text editor/IDE is TextMate. I like it because it has pretty syntax highlighting, and a simple project view. I know there is cheaper, but it has lots of bundles and stuff, and I got it pretty cheap as a part of the MacHeist bundle. OS X only.

Now, Evan Weaver, fellow polymorpher is a big fan of Smultron. Smultron is a lot like TextMate, but simplified. It has simple project support, simple snippets, and simple extensions. If you are on OS X and need a simple, free text editor, I would choose Smultron.

Cross Platform Fun!

These last two haven't really been IDEs. TextMate has a lot of the features of one, but no class trees, or gantt charts, or debuggers. Neither does this next one. Most people have participated in a language, or OS, or cellular provider debate, but imagine the many many hours spent arguing Emacs versus Vi. A great option of those with a really bad resolution, or like the command prompt is GNU Screen, and Emacs/Vi. They both have great scripting interfaces, code highlighting, and GNU Screen makes it all easy. But there is a big problems with these "IDEs", they take forever to configure with all the right extensions, because they come lightweight. Another polymorpher, Chris Wanstrath uses vim.

There is a nice IDE out there written in and for Ruby, FreeRIDE. Now, I have never been able to get FreeRIDE to work on my Mac, but I hear it is good. It has a lot of those IDE features that commercial developers just crave, like a big map of all your classes, and a fancy debugger. It comes with the One Click Ruby Installer on Windows.

A great cross-platform text editor is jEdit. It has syntax highlighting for tons of languages, runs on pretty much every platform, and is super extensible.

The most common cross-platform ruby IDE is Eclipse with the Ruby Development Tools. It is a fully featured IDE with project management, debugger, test/unit integration, SCM integration, and extensibility like no one else. It also has lots and lots of other tools out there that you can add. Eclipse is also a big IDE in the Java world, and many other IDEs are based on it, so this is an easy changeover from Java. The RadRails IDE is based on it.

Another cross-platform IDE is Komodo by ActiveState. This one has many of the big commercial IDE features, and supports many languages. This is also a good transition IDE, because it is built like most other IDEs.

Windows! Xp! Vista!

In the Windows world, there is a wonderful text editor, Scite, which is based on the Scintilla toolkit. Scite is a lightweight editor, and has a featureset much like that of Smultron. It is my choice for Windows development.

The IDE for Windows is...Visual Studio! With the Ruby In Steel extensions, ruby works great in VS. It has a fast debugger, and tons of cool intellisense stuff, that I can only pretend to understand. if you are on Windows, check it out!

IDE? Text Editor?

So, as you can see, there are tons of options for what IDE or editor you should use, and there are a lot more I didn't even mention. The best way to pick one is to just download them and try them out. Some people like a full out IDE, others like a simple editor, some like both. As more people start developing in ruby, these IDEs are going to start to shape up, and become really good. Pretty soon ruby IDEs will be as common as Java ones are today, but a lot better, just like the language!