Windows Ruby On Rails IDEs and Text Editors
I was just reading about how the core Rails team love their Macs and the TextMate editor. Since I personally chose M$ Windows as my developmetn platform, so was interested to read about the comments left by other Windows users who have their own favourite editors.
For your pleasure, here's a summary of those Windows editors:
PSPad
Freeware. Positive feedback on this one since it can be set up to look a little like TextMate. Apparently it has a file explorer panel that will show the TortoiseSVN context menus. Light memory footprint, bags of features including file compare, code helper etc.
RubyEclipse
Open Source. SVN integration. Debugger, code completion (albeit a touch buggy) and a test runner. Uses up about 51MB of ram so a touch on the heavy side.
RadRails
Open Source. Promising reports from users. I've used earlier versions and it was very good. A few bugs and the memory footprint (45MB+) caused me to stop using it, but I'll certainly try it again. Features include SVN integration, WeBrick runner, syntax highlighting, code assist etc...
XEmacs
Open Source. Loads of developers love Emacs, although it comes with a steep learning curve. Apparently it does everything under the sun. I do have plans to learn this tool one day...
TextPad
The text editor I use the most. It's great, light weight and has tons of features. If you dig around the site you'll find some ruby syntax files (and hundrends of others)
[Getting tired now!... so sorry it the descriptions start getting naff! Here's some more to check out]
Scite
Open Source. A small and well loved editor!
UltraEdit
Commercial License, but looks good and users always give good reviews.
Feel free to leave your comments or mention any I've missed...
posted by Tobin Harris @ Monday, January 09, 2006
11 Comments:
Crimson Editor at http://www.crimsoneditor.com/
Mmmh Pspad only shows the tortoise menus, not the status icons,thus making those menus close to useless, crimson editor tags "better" at views (lets you see clearly html code from eruby), but IMO both have a weak hilighters, if only RDE had a file navigation panel, sigh.
eclipse is a well... java meaning:configure download jars setup/configure....
check dependencies....
download more jars....
validate jars...
configure...
get utterly bored...
could had used scite and be done already instead of setting up eclipse, damnit with it, everything has to be big, dependent, slow and bloated...like a dinosaur
I second Crimson.
And TextWrangler on the Mac.
Nice post - thanks for sharing.
I have been using Notepad++ for quite awhile with all my development - it supports Ruby (and a bunch of other languages) and is pretty lightweight.
Um, I don't know if you were using Eclipse .1 or what, but as long as you have java on your system, you download it and double click on the file to make it run. No jars to download, setup, configure, etc.
I tried RadRails a few months back and dropped it because I was getting away from the whole java world. After a few months of command line and cream (a vim front-end which I recommend if you swing that way), I've gone back to RadRails and am quite satisfied. Frankly, I just like it for the ease of having my project laid out with an integrated text editor, but most of the other features are quite pleasant.
I do think it's better to start with something more basic since, at least as of the current release, I still hit the command line pretty often (it may just be what I'm used to). In any case, it's at least worth a look if you're stuck in Windows (I'll love trying out TextMate or BBEdit _when_ I get my Mac :) ).
I'm with the last guy -- I started working with Rails via cygwin just using vim; I tried RadRails a week or two after it came out, and it was... chunky. Vim and a few UNIX commands (e.g. grep) were lightweight enough for me to get things done, as I already had decent vi and shell experience from a UNIX background. It was a lightweight, clean way to approach lightweight, clean Rails.
RadRails seemed bloated and bizarre to me. But I have little Java experience; it seemed to me like VS.NET built on Swing, with about half the features. But I'm a jerk like that. =)
After a while I figured Cygwin, though nice for development, was a bad way to run Ruby for performance reasons. I got the mswin32 Ruby and, wanting to keep my PATH vars orderly (and my Windows and UNIX hemispheres separate), I decided to try to stay away from Cygwin, including my much-adored vim. So, I went back and checked out RadRails about three weeks ago, and really took the time to understand how Eclipse works (cost me maybe four or five hours due to slower coding before I got the hang of it)... and now it's my primary dev environment for Rails.
I should qualify this by saying that I installed Eclipse standalone, then picked up RDT and RadRails as separate plugins. (I don't trust all-in-one installers for installing plug-ins projects; I remember the pain I felt when getting MSDE to work and - more importantly - to properly uninstall in a Windows Installer project maybe 5 years ago.)
There's a few caveats and extra work to be done to get it comfy for a typical Windows coder - for instance, I had to change a few key bindings to match what I was used to from my IDEs (namely VS.NET), such as Ctrl-Tab to switch between editor windows instead of Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn. And it took a little while to rearrange my perspective/workspace/whatever to suit my needs (and I still change it around now and then); once I got everything set up, though, it trundles along pretty well.
There's some strange RadRails-related quirks, I've found. For instance, if you have a WEBrick server that's started through the 'Servers' view and you close down Eclipse, there's a tendency when you open it again for the server to still be in the 'Started' state even though the process is long dead; just hitting the 'restart' button clears it up and synchs it up again. Or, for instance, RadRails apparently sets up its OWN default web browser of IE for WEBrick servers (which you can't modify in the preferences; it doesn't use the Web Browser setting in Eclipse's preferences, and ignores my System Default Browser of Firefox) for when you click the globe icon in the Servers view. Or that RXML (Builder) views don't get syntax highlighting, and forcing the filetype to use the Ruby or Rails editor doesn't seem to help. There's lots of goofy (but minor) problems like that, but it's not that terrible, and having an actual modern, graphical IDE really does save me time versus switching between four or five shell prompts running VIM. As much as I'm embarassed by it, the ability to ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab through a dozen open documents, or to use a mouse to select files to open, really does speed up my coding versus 'vim app/controllers/whatever' (even with tab completion)!
Also, FYI, twice I got a JVM error that crashed out Eclipse (this is after maybe ~120 hours of dev work), but that felt more like a Windows/JVM problem than an Eclipse problem. (We're talking 10+ hour workdays and hibernating the system overnight; a good way to make Windows all melty after a few days.) And besides, all it really did was forget which pages were open (since my Pavlovian Alt-S reflex is my autosave feature), like workspace settings and such, so I wouldn't let that scare you too much.
All-in-all, if you can afford a few hours to get comfortable with Eclipse and its... uh, interesting paradigm for development work (Views, Perspectives, a heavy emphasis on Java that you can usually ignore), it's not too shabby. Probably the closest you can get to a Visual Studio kind of full-fledged IDE.
As for the other guys, SCiTE and Notepad++ are nice stylistically/simplistically, and I've done some work in both. FreeRIDE doesn't really think in Rails, and I got tired of it quickly. I really need to give Crimson a try apparently.
...
Also, my two cents here: Eclipse was a one-click installer for the most part. I opened it up, found 'Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install', pulled down RDT and RadRails (you might need to get the 'Remote Site URLs' for the file trees off their websites), and it loaded and configured everything automatically. I don't know what this 'download jars' junk is that the first guy is talking about. (Yes, I know what JARs are, I just mean I didn't have to do anything that low-level at all.)
If you love Visual Studio, try out RIDE-ME.
You can code RUBY in Visual Studio 2005, http://www.sapphiresteel.com/
Hey, regarding Crimson Editor. How do you get this stuff to add existing files to a project and preserve directory structure etc. This function seems pretty niave to me, but cldnt figure a way out to do this in Crimson Editor. Maybe I missed something?
You should check out Notepad 2!
It's basically equally light weighted as notepad 1 though it does have a couple of nice features that the 1.0 version doesn't have like syntax highlighting and multiple undo etc...
It's not a fully fledged editor like Ultra Edit is but it fires in 0.0001 seconds instead of 1.0 minutes...!! ;)
(Ultra Edit start time was my main reason for ditching it a couple of years ago, and things haven't been better since then)
Btw, I've started my own blog now (finally...;) I need some place to promote Gaia, check it out at:
here...
Btw, I guess this is a "shameless plug" for promoting my own blog... ;)
.t
I would definitely recommend RoRED by Marcus Oblak. Check it out here: http://www.plasmacode.com. I'e also written a small review on it and compared it to RadRails here: http://jpgeek.blogspot.com/2006/12/ruby-on-rails-ide-for-windows.html.
Cheers!
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