Ruby IDEs

Using a combination Notepad2 (with no Ruby syntax highlighting) and Windows Explorer definitely left much to be desired in terms of an editor.

jEdit was my first foray into the IDE search since someone suggested it on the DrProject for MarkUs. It does the syntax highlighting just fine, but the File System Browser is almost too simplistic and does not integrate very well with the text editing part. Also, having multiple files open at once is not very intuitive at all. It actually took me several hours of using it to even notice that I wasn’t just having one file open at once and it replacing my existing session with the new file I wanted to open, but has a dropdown of all the files I’ve ever opened since I didn’t know I could close them. I could probably get used to it with some more time spent at it, but it feels a bit awkward.

The next editor that I tried was Komodo Edit. It allows for “projects” which are basically the contents of a folder as far as I am concerned at the moment. This was definitely a key feature I saw missing in jEdit. You can also visually see all of the files that you have open with tabs! You can click on multiple files in the project view and open them all at once. Ctrl+w closes tabs, as does Ctrl+F4. You can also navigate back between previous locations in a file. Next test: make sure that it has good preferences like jEdit did. Completions aren’t completely intuitive, but you do use Ctrl+space or tab (!) to cycle through them (they’re not in a nice pretty dropdown like in Eclipse). I am fairly content with the preferences for Komodo Edit.

Some other options that I found in my research that I didn’t check out:

• ED for Windows
• RadRails – cross-platform
• NetBeans