Ruby and Rails IDE Comparison

by Obie Fernandez on Mar 02, 2007 |

A nameless blogger gives us one of the most comprehensive comparisons of Ruby IDEs available to date. While most hardcore Rubyists use either of the venerable text editors Emacs or Vim, the author of the comparison article seems to take the position that success in a large project settings depends on having the full power of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

The review features descriptions, commentary, feature comparison tables and even screenshots, of the following products:

Intellij Idea 6.0 with (JetBrains) Ruby Plugin 0.1.1.
NetBeans 6 Daily Snapshot (Versions 20070211 to 20070221) with Common Scripting Language API/Support 0.14.0/0.17.0.1.1.1.1.3, Embedded Ruby 0.11.0, JRuby Implementation 0.92.4, Rake-Based Project Support 0.10.0, Ruby IDE Support 0.20.0, Ruby On Rails 1.1600.0, Ruby on Rails Project Support 0.16.0, and Ruby Projects 0.17.0.1.
Eclipse 3.2.1 with RDT Snapshot Plugin and RadRails Plugin 0.7.2 (the latest standalone RadRails version did not work for the author.)

Notably absent from the comparison is Komodo, Visual Studio SapphireSteel, and JEdit with Ruby Plugin.

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Community comments

Emacs or Vim? by Sam Smoot Posted

Nice by Sebastien Auvray Posted

JEdit by Sam Corder Posted

Re: JEdit by Zak Mandhro Posted

Write Ruby code faster with ED for Windows by Neville Franks Posted

Emacs or Vim? by Sam Smoot

You don't think most Rubyists use Textmate?

I mean sure more _Railsers_ use Textmate, but I would've thought most plain ol' Rubyists these days would use Textmate if given the chance.

Nice by Sebastien Auvray

Hi Obie,
Thank you for your note. Nice to see my comparison wasn't useless.
By the way I am not nameless, that's just the mysterious title of my blog. I am Sébastien Auvray and you can find my profile and Email addie in About.
Regards,
Sébastien.

JEdit by Sam Corder

I haven't tried JEdit with Ruby plugin but last time I checked JEdit was just an editor. There isn't much integrated about it except the syntax highlighting. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong and newer JEdit versions are different.

Re: JEdit by Zak Mandhro

Sam, with the right plug-ins and configuration, JEdit can match the functionality of other IDEs. See www.eadz.co.nz/blog/article/ruby-rails-jedit.html

Write Ruby code faster with ED for Windows by Neville Franks

I've just finished a significant upgrade to our IDE, ED for Windows to include Ruby language support. I've written a Blog post at: blog.surfulater.com/2007/02/21/write-ruby-code-... which will give you a good overview of ED's capabilities with a specific focus on Ruby.

ED4W is a full featured Programmer's Editor/IDE with support for 30+ languages. It includes all of the editing capabilities you would expect plus a built-in Source Database Engine that tracks every class, method, module, struct etc. in real time enabling you to instantly jump to any function etc. and making navigation of large complex code bases much easier.

I'm particularly interested in feedback on the new Ruby capabilities in this release. I tested various Ruby editors and was surprised at how poor a job they'd done with even basic things like syntax highlighting.

The ED Web site is at www.getsoft.com I suggest you start with the Blog post though.

Neville Franks, Author of ED for Windows and Surfulater.