I’d like to hear which tools people are currently using for their Ruby development - specifically when developing apps on top of the Numerex stack.

I’m having a hard time deciding on whether or not to use a full-fledged IDE or just use a text editor + command line.

Now, I realize this type of discussion can turn into one of those “religious” type arguments - but that’s not why I’m asking about it. I’m just curious to hear what people are using and why. Are there any major reason why you chose NOT to use a specific tool?

Currently, I’m jumping back and forth between Aptana Studio and TextMate + command line. Both seem to do what I need - and I do have some Eclipse experience from prior projects, just not with Ruby.

Anyway - I’d like to hear what you all are using…

Thanks,
Scott

Scott,

We tend to use several here—each of us has their own preference. I’d say the popular ones are Aptana RadRails, TextMate, and Netbeans.  Personally I use Aptana, but I’m not in love with it—it definitely has some quirks that keep me from recommending it wholeheartedly.

I’m developing in Windows using Ruby In Steel and Visual Studio 2008. I have Netbeans installed but debugging seems to be a pain so I haven’t used it much.

Richard

Richard - that’s a new one to me. Thanks. I’m actually coming from a .NET background, so I’ll check this out for sure.

Thanks again.

I was using the Aptana plugin for Eclipse on a Mac, but have recently started using Netbeans because I found aptana had stability issues. Netbeans is vastly more stable and the editor works much better. Auto-completion is actually good enough to be useful, for example. However, I find the subversion interface less than straightforward and I have not tried debugging yet.

I use TortoiseSVN for SCM client external to VS and AnkhSVN within the VS environment. I find TortoiseSVN is better for checking for modifications against the repository though.

Richard

Richard - thanks for that Ruby in Steel suggestion. I just looked at it, and it really does look pretty good.

Regarding TortoiseSVN and Ankh, I also use Tortoise for my .NET development. However, I found Ankh to be a huge pain, especially when you’re making structural changes to your VS solution (like if you’re deleting or moving folders). So, I broke down an purchased VisualSVN. WAAAAAY better for SVN inside of VS. I rarely have issues with it.

For my ruby development, I’m working on a Mac. But if that Ruby in Steel plugin pans out, I may be selling my Mac pretty soon.

-Scott

Great, I’ll have to take a look at VisualSVN. I haven’t done anything major with AnkhSVN within VS so I haven’t run into any major problems but I don’t like the update process which doesn’t give me any report of changes or merges that may have occurred. That’s why I keep on switching back to Tortoise before updating.

Richard

Scott, if you sell your Mac you’ll be banned from the forums forever!

I originally used Aptana on Mac and then fell in love with TextMate. I’ve been meaning to experiment with XCode as this article details:

http://developer.apple.com/tools/developonrailsleopard.html

Looks fairly promising.

Vim forever.

If you want a full fledged IDE, I’d take a look at RedMine http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/index.html. It’s the only IDE I used in Ruby that I actually considered as useful enough to take the resource hit.

Looks impressive. I was a big fan of IntelliJ IDEA a long, long time ago. Will download RubyMine shortly and give it a test drive. Thx for the tip.

I’ve been using RubyMine for a couple weeks now and have been impressed. I’ve used other JetBrains products in the past (most notably their ReSharper tool for Visual Studio) and have come to appreciate the amount of effort they put into productivity tools.

I’m pretty much sold on it and have decided to use it as my IDE of choice moving forward. The only downside I can think of (besides not being free) is the learning curve. The list of keystrokes required to take full advantage of all the features is quite large…

I’ve been using different JetBrains tools for the last 3-4 years. So naturally I tried RubyMine right away when I had to start developing with Rails. It resembles Idea (JetBrains’ IDE for Java) very much and if you have experience with it it should be easy to start with RubyMine.
sleonard, you don’t really have to learn all supported shortkeys. I use very limited list which is enough for effective development.

I also used to be a big fan of IntelliJ IDEA. and i think im going to chech out rubymine. thanks for the info.