What Ruby IDE do you use, and why?

Watch expressions in the RDT debugger would be extremely useful. Perhaps a way to jump into IRB at a breakpoint (similar to the breakpoint library) while simultaneously being able to use the expressions/variables tabs to view the current data structures being created or accessed in the IRB session. Refactoring is of course very nice, but difficult to do w/ dynamic languages. There are always speed issues with Eclipse and I've accepted that, but it would be nice if RDT could be break away from Eclipse and be a seperate program without all the bloat (kind of like Azureus uses SWT but is not exactly an eclipse plugin). However, I'm not sure how hard it would be to stay current with things like Subclipse if you break away from Eclipse. Better syntax coloring would be nice. Currently, all numbers (regardless of whether they are part of a function name or a module or so on) are colored differently. That's not exactly desired behavior. Any sort of intellisense would be nice, but again I realize that is difficult with dynamic languages. A "Goto Definition" option for a selected piece of text would be nice. I'm constantly using find to move from a function call I see to the function's actual implementation. All that said, I still enjoy using RDT at work and will continue to use it. Keep up the good work!

Why use textmate? Why did the Apostles wear sandals?

I use Emacs for my Ruby coding (along with all of my other coding/editing); do you have some variety of Emacs-keybinding-compatibility mode? That would be a must for me to even try anything else.

I use TextMate (though I already owned a Mac) and I've never used RDT, so take this for what it's worth. When I say I use TM, what I'm saying is I use a text editor. It could just has easily been emacs, vim, or any other programmer oriented text editor. I, like many others I believe, simply don't care for IDEs. In my Java days I used one (intelliJ), but that's because Java and J2EE coding damn near requires it. Ruby and the other dynamic languages simply don't. This is not to say that assistance from our tooling is not desired, it is. It just can't be overwhelming so that you end up catering to the whims and design decisions of the IDE. So here's what _I_ want in a developer tool - not necessarily what RDT should be focusing on. - Good text editing. - A debugger with breakpoints, the ability to step into, over, etc. methods, variable watching, the regualr stuff. - Syntax highlighting - A debugger - Integration with CVS/SubVersion/etc. - A debugger - Integrated Ruby runtime with unit testing - A debugger - Good text and file navigation - And a debugger. Now, I understand that RDT has all this, but when I look at the screenshots I see clutter. There's a menu bar and a button bar. The left hand portion of the app is wasted on file/class/etc. navigation tools. The bottom section has a regex viewer and a console window. And the poor text editor has been relegated to the top right portion of the display. Get rid of all the clutter. Heck get rid of Eclipse. Give me a good text editor and keep the other tools out of the way until needed. You want a successful Ruby IDE? Add debugging to TextMate.

@PeterLacey: Looking at the screenshots of RDT won't tell you much, you'll have to try it to see what it's like. Before I switched to Eclipse, I had looked at screenshots over and over... but failed to be impressed, which changed quickly after giving it a spin. For instance: the screen layout isn't fixed, so all the 'clutter' can be removed, eg. with a single double click on the editor tab, which will then take up all the screen space (minus menu/toolbars).

It doesn't *feel* right. TextMate looks and feels like an OS X app.

As most of my experience has been Java development using Eclipse, RDT is exactly what I want - Ruby functionality for Eclipse. I want syntax highlighting, debugging, content-assist and everything else JDT has for Java. However, I'm comfortable with the idea of an IDE. I think there's a lot of developers out there that are very prejudiced against IDEs, and there's no way you're ever going to win them over. They want text editors that take up 2mb of RAM. They will refuse to use anything that doesn't have Emacs or vim keybindings. I think the best approach is to focus on the developers that you can please, and please them well.

I blogged about what I would like to see in a Ruby IDE a while ago here http://www.theniceweb.com/JaviersBlog/2005/09/getting-rid-of-notepad.html but time has passed and RDT has seen two releases after that (also, back then I didn't even knew RadRails existed) Still, I think no much improvement have been reached in those particular areas. Yes, RDT is my actual Ruby IDE of choice, mostly because I just seem to be unable to live without test unit support right in my IDE. You seem to be the only one that actually understand how important is that nowadays. The code editor and the debugger are pretty decent, even if I tend to agree with Zachary. Again, I do think most of what I was complaining about in my post could be done, because is not about the language, is about integrating useful tools into the IDE or providing help in intelligent, inobtrusive ways... things like providing a "Surround with..." option in a right click menu if I happen to have selected a piece of code. I'll say it again, RDT is the best Ruby editor I know, but it doesn't mean it can't get better. Kudos to you for such a good work.

I'm only new to ruby but I've been using Arachno Ruby. It offers a nice editor with lots of keyboard shortcuts and error highlighting. The debuggers pretty good too although I find myself using the rails console for most things.

Eclipse is an unpleasant experience on the Mac. RDT can't overcome that - that's one reason why it won't make headway against TextMate for existing Mac users. TextMate's not a reason to buy a Mac, but it's an easy purchase if you have one. For other platforms maybe Eclipse works. Interestingly, Netbeans, while still not completely "native", is a much more tolerable experience on the Mac, so if you wanted adoption of a Java-based opensource Ruby IDE maybe that's an option.

I bought a pair of Macs for TextMate because it just gets the most right. Here's what I need: * Themes. After toying with Cream/VIM, I realized that I just couldn't live with black text on eye-searing white backgrounds anymore. Not in a program I'm going to be using for 8+ hours a day. I need alternate, easy-on-the-eyes, themes, and it needs to feel like a theme. Being able to change a few individual colors in Eclipse is not enough. * Tabs. Most editors come with this, but some otherwise great editors (Cream/VIM) don't. * Feel. TextMate looks like a well-polished OSX app. Cream doesn't look like a Windows app. TextEdit doesn't either. UltraEdit is indespensible for me on Windows, but it's very busy, it's explorer isn't a Windows FileView, so no contextual stuff (like using TortoiseSVN from it), no concept of a project, etc. * Projects. IDE's get the right obviously. TextMate does too. * Great Syntax Highlighting. I don't need and don't want Intellisense in Ruby. I don't put in a lot of effort into learning a lot of shortcuts and macros. I use Eclipse+RDT, VS.NET+Resharper, and UltraEdit at work. I use TextMate at home. I don't have the attention span frankly to dig much beyond the surface and what's immediately intuitable. It's not that I hate IDE's, and I don't really care if my editor is using 10, 100, or 500 MB of RAM if it doesn't get in the way of working with it. It's just that I'm not going to dig too deeply into it. Maybe that makes me dumb, but I think that sort of user is a lot more common than the sort that can sling out tons of shortcuts and know every knook and cranny of their environment. So if you had to focus on anything in RDT right now, and this may be outside of your scope but just the same, I'd appreciate theming support with a few nice low-brightness themes.

It's kinda like what Alton Brown says. Yes the cooking show guy of "Good Eats". I love that show. Anyways he pushes the idea of multi-use tools. Well TextMate is just that. It is my text editor. I use it for everything from modifying conf files to codeing. Not saying eclipse couldn't or the others couldn't, but Textmate was built on the idea of multi-use text editor and not an IDE. That being said, the others might be better at programming ruby projects. Actually I would suspect they are better with workflow and such, but at the end of the day, I am going to have to use a text editor for something, I might as well work to master just that one app, and learn to make it work for my coding too.

I hope you're still reading this. The only person that seemed to have a reasonable answer was 'SAM'. My answer is similar, but I'll break it down even easier. -- I can be at a shell prompt and type 'mate .' and get my current directory in TextMate as a project. So simple. If I then run a command like script/generate and new files are added, they automatically show up in the "project" because the project is really just a file/folder tree. -- The themes are more than just syntax highlighting color changes. IMO the themes that come with it are excellent. -- It makes updating very easy with an auto-check and displays the changes in it's own window whenever you update. -- You can type over auto tag completions. -- It has (IMO) the default settings that any editor should for tabs, spaces, indentation, autocompletion, etc. -- The macros are easy to learn. You just click the menu at the bottom of the window, find the thing you want and it shows the code for the macro and the shortcut key. -- An example I'm not sure how else to describe: If you press ctrl-z on a new line, it will create a "<%= %" with the cursor in the middle. When you type the expression you want it to display, you can then press TAB and it will jump to the end of the output tag. If you select some text (a variable name, for example) and press ctrl-z it creates the output tag around the variable and keeps it selected, you can then press TAB and it will jump to the end of the output tag, as with the previous example. ---- To me, this stuff is just the way things should work. I LOVE IT. :)

I'd really like block matching in RadRails (and hence, in RDT). Find the matching end for a begin. Vim can do this in Ruby now -- it's a simple tweak that would be very nice.

I'm only just starting out with Ruby, and i'd like to use a nice IDE (on Windows) and tried RadRails... Being a Java App its so hideously resource hungry its not funny, hell it just falls over on my machine as my windows desktop session runs out of handles. Can anyone suggest an efficient/low resource usage IDE (i.e. not Java based)?

JEdit. Look it up. It has block matching, syntax highlight, abbreviations just like TextMate, intergrated RDoc, autocomplete, everything you would need. Google "jedit ruby rails"

I've been looking at JEdit - seems incredibly slow on my system. The biggest problem with RDT at the moment is that I just have to do far too much to get a piece of Ruby code running. I should just be able to install Eclipse and RDT, open up a .rb or .rbw file and hit Run. Or, more importantly, Debug (with options to step through the code).