radrails

Sunday, October 09 2005

Finally a dedicated ruby on rails IDE. It's based on Eclipse and the Ruby Development Tools, which is what I use now. The new IDE includes dedicated wizards instead of what I have been doing which is using external tools.

Check it out.

-James

Comments

#1 Sam on 10.10.2005 at 2:26 PM

So watcha think of it so far?



I really like UltraEdit. If they would just fix their syntax highlighting, add some for .rhtml, and extend the file-tree-view to be able to add files to specific directories it'd be about perfect for me.



One of my favorite things about RoR is getting away from IDEs. On the other hand, if the syntax highlighting is good, if the project/file explorer gets the basics right, if I get a tabbed interface, and if it's *fast*, then I might just switch. At least until I can afford a Mac so I can use TextMate. ;)

#2 James Avery on 10.10.2005 at 2:38 PM

It has been working good. The syntax highlighting is nice, the collapsing of methods is nice. The wizards are pretty good, about the same functionality that I got from the external tool macros.



I dont need a full-fledged IDE, but it's nice to have the highlighting, solution explorer, and tabs. It is reasonably fast, Eclipse has never been known as a speed demon though.



I have read about TextMate but never really looked at it. I wonder if anyone will get around to porting it over to the PC. I also installed the Notepad2 version with ruby syntax highlighting which is nice for times when I dont need the full IDE.

#3 peterjwright@gmail.com (Peter Wr on 10.10.2005 at 3:31 PM

Hey nice find James! I've been muddling along with BBEdit on Mac OS which is pretty nice, but this looks so much nicer. I'll grab it when I've finished work and have a play.

#4 Sam on 10.13.2005 at 5:18 AM

Ok, after having "liberated" the office Mac Mini (borrowed it for a few nights), I can tell you: TextMate is so perfect I could cry. I was on the fence, but I'm so switching now. It's just so light-weight it's beautiful, and Locomotive makes Rails development a snap (since I'm used to the CLI generators anyways, though wizard support would be nice). I've never used BBEdit, but you owe it to yourself to try TextMate if you haven't already. It really is that good.



I tried out RadRails, and didn't get syntax highlighting for rhtml. You did inspire me to finally give RDT a shot though, and it's actually much better than I imagined. Speed demon no, but way faster than VS.NET or ArachnoRuby, so I'm happy. After going through the RDT guide though, I'm wondering if I couldn't just mark rhtml's as JSP in RadRails too. I'll give it a shot in the morning.



As far as TextMate:



* It's very "light". It "feels" even lighter than Notepad since the menubar isn't attached.


* The project explorer is just slick. Really slick. You get a sense of it in the RoR movies, but it's even better.


* Snippets are cool. There's lots built in, but you can add more. It's a lot simpler than Eclipse's way it seems.


* It's tabbed. Easy to close, easier to rearrange.


* It's got great syntax-highlighting for Rails. (Rare)


* It's got great color themes (doubly-rare! The only editor I've used that's come close is Cream, but I have to have tabs so Cream is out)



The last is oh so important to me. After working with Cream for a week I realized I'd never seen anything like it's color themes before. It was really hard giving that up and going back to your average eye-searing editor, but I can't work without tabs. :-)

#5 Mischa Kroon on 10.17.2005 at 2:06 PM

You might want to have a look at the newly released tutorials to have RoR integrate with dreamweaver MX 2004.



Links to them can be found here:


http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/mischa/archive/2005/10/15/9837.aspx

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