Ruby IDE Roundup: JetBrains Releases Rubymine 4.0, Ruby for NetBeans 7.1 in the Works

by Mirko Stocker on Feb 22, 2012 |

JetBrains released a new version of their Ruby IDE RubyMine 4. The focus of the previous major release 3.0 was on Rails 3 support, code coverage, and improved debugging. RubyMine 4.0 brings better performance, and contains incremental improvements and polishing in various areas. From the release notes:

The new IDE architecture allows more actions to operate asynchronously and to avoid memory blocks. As an example 'Inspect Code' function is now running up to four times faster. [..] RubyMine UI is significantly reworked to be more compact, modern and comfortable on all supported platforms. Reorganized main menu, new look for navigation bar, updated editor tabs, etc.

Another area that has received much attention in this release is static analysis and easier navigation of the source code. For example, the relations between classes can be displayed in a UML diagram, the Structure and Hierarchy view shows subtypes and inherited methods, and code-completion and navigation now also work on Gems with native extensions. Code inspection has also been improved, code that does not follow the Ruby style guide is flagged and quick-fixes can be used to amend an inconsistency. The new Inline Method refactoring substitutes a method invocation with the method's body. The JetBrains RubyMine blog regularly posts tips and tricks on how to use the IDE more productively and is a great resource for beginners.

Besides Ruby, RubyMine comes with new or better support for other languages like CoffeeScript, HAML, SCSS and LESS. CoffeeScript sources can now be compiled to JavaScript directly in the IDE.

RubyMine is available in a free 30 days trial edition. Professional licenses cost $149, personal licenses are available at $69, and open source projects or educational users can apply for a free license.

Users of NetBeans, for which the official Ruby support was dropped last year, will be relieved to hear that JRuby's Tom Enebo has released a preview release for NetBeans 7.1. Tom elaborates on the reason why the Ruby support from NetBeans 7.0 doesn't work on 7.1 anymore:

Netbeans 7.1 updated some components (as software is known to do). One of those components was html.editor.lib. Ruby support was dependent on version 1, but NetBeans 7.1 only ships version 2 now.

Which one is your preferred IDE or editor for writing Ruby code?

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Community comments

Rails Plugin for Intellij by Matt Giacomini Posted

I have a soft spot for Netbeans by jean-simon Larochelle Posted

I love this ruby style by Gerardo Gonzalez Cruz Posted

Netbeans/Rubymine by Douwe Vonk Posted

Rails Plugin for Intellij by Matt Giacomini

I was looking into using RubyMine, but I already have an intellij license, so I thought I would just give the Ruby plugin a try. The rails support in the Ruby plugin is quite good IMO, to the point where I have not even bothered looking into RubyMine.

So if you already own an intellij license give it a try first.

I have a soft spot for Netbeans by jean-simon Larochelle

I like Netbeans because it works rather well as a Ruby IDE and for all of my other programming languages (Java, C++). Glad to hear they updated the plugin but I will stick to 7.01 where it seems to work ok.

I love this ruby style by Gerardo Gonzalez Cruz

I love this ruby style thanks to shared. In this time i'm learning more about ruby styling.

Netbeans/Rubymine by Douwe Vonk

I mainly use JRuby with Java libs - no Rails. Sadly Rubymine does not support this combination so I stick - quite happily - with Netbeans.