Saturday, June 9, 2007

Ruby editors?

I usually code in c# so figuring out which editor to use is pretty much a no-brainer. Well with Ruby there is a little bit more of a choice. When I first started looking into Ruby I had been using the RDT plugin for Eclipse which was great but I noticed recently that they haven't been doing much with it. This doesn't mean it's bad or anything, I mean it still works like it did before, I just thought that maybe there were bigger and better things now-days. So my quest began. I remembered RadRails but wanted something that was good for plain Ruby development and Rails development. RadRails was basically for Rails. I looked into just using Emacs, but I wanted something that could debug and do all the fancy things I was used to. There was ActiveState's Komodo IDE which looked really great until I saw that there was a price tag, and a hefty one too for someone like me who was just tinkering. Then I finally stumbled accross TextMate and Aptana's RadRails. These are both really good (TextMate is only really good if you have a Mac though, no Windows/*nix versions). I noticed that everyone on the Rails team uses TextMate, but I've used Eclipse before for Java dev and really liked it so I was kinda stuck.

Yes yes I have the RadRails in there 2x. The story behind this is that when I first started looking into Ruby RadRails was mainly for Rails and that was it. Now the Company Aptana has taken RadRails project AND the RDT project and melded them together. So now you can get both the Aptana + Rails config and it works for plain Ruby or Rails stuff, it also has lots of nice features for css/html/javascript editing.

So I guess the biggest thing for me right now is the price. TextMate is great and everything.. but it's 39 Euros (About $53 US) and Aptana's RadRails is free and is completely focused on Ruby only whereas TextMate is a text editor for lots of things.


4 comments:

BlackTigerX said...

is there anything in TextMate that is worth to pay the 53 bucks?

if you're doing it just for hobby now Aptana doesn't seem bad at all

Unknown said...

Komodo Edit is free. While it doesn't have debugging and a few other features, it compares well against editors like TextMate.
- Shane Caraveo, Tech Lead, Komodo, ActiveState

Justin Wilson said...

Ahhh yes.. I did forget about the Komodo Edit. I've used Komodo before (with Python) and really liked it. I'll have to download it and check it out..
thanks for the info :)

Smith325 said...

You should look into NetBeans IDE. It supports ruby and even provides suggestions for the Ruby Beginner.