I am developing on Linux, so I will only consider applications available to me on this platform.
My research has resulted in three alternatives:
- RadRails from Aptana
- Eclispe with Dynamic Languages Toolkit
- Vim/gVim
You might ask yourself "Why vim? Isn't that a text editor?" and you'd be right. But with the right combination of plugins, and the time to learn the shortcuts, it's really powerful.
The plugins you'll want are these:
- Rails plugin for Vim
- NERDTree (A directory browser that integrates with the Rails plugin)
- Vividchalk color scheme based on the Vibrant Ink theme for TextMate
Eclipse with Dynamic Languages Toolkit:
This is the pure IDE I've been looking for. It's fast, it's lightweight and it's familliar to me. To get this setup up and running you'll want these:
- Bare bone Eclipse (Does not include any cruft like Java support)
- Dynamic Languages Toolkit
- YEdit for YAML support
Last but not least:
Aptana RadRails
To get this up and running, you fetch it here:
This is really a complete package, so if you want to get up and running fast, this is it. The webpage can tell you more about its features than I will bother to write here.
Read below why I have striked through this.
Conclusion
I ended up with a combination. I am using Eclipse with Dynamic Languages Toolkit for editing pure Ruby files, and through Eclipse I open ERB files in gVim.
This works pretty well for me. I have an environment that is lightning fast and where I get all the features from an IDE I care about.
Update 25.02.2010:
I have now tried RadRails for the past couple of days and I must really say it has improved since last time I used it. It now feels both fast and responsive, and it really does package everything I need into one neat package. I am going to try RadRails for a while now, it really does offer a lot for being free!
Once I started using RubyMine, I've not been able to touch anything else for Rails development.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I will try out RubyMine!
ReplyDelete