It appears that NetBeans and Aptana/RadRails are the most common adopted IDE's for Ruby on Rails development, but both needs the Java Runtime Environment to run.
I'm looking for an IDE wich doesn't need JRE to run. If it is lightweight and installs very fast would be better, because I will be programming in computers with old hardware and Windows XP.
Do you know any? Thanks a lot.
Maybe E?
I am a big fan of SciTE and the command line.
Actually I would say that Vim paired with rails.vim is amongst the most popular editors for Rails. Vim, gVim and Cream are all available for Windows.
Learning curve is massively steep, but its worth it.
Also, if you are doing any serious Rails work, development on Windows sucks. It takes way too long to spin up a script/console or a web. Tooling is much better on Linux. When I'm doing Rails work on my Windows box I do it on an Ubuntu VM.
Komodo Edit is one of the best IDEs I've ever used, and it has Rails support (although maybe not as good as Aptana/RadRails). If you have money to spare, I'd highly recommend Komodo IDE, as it has some great extra features, but if not, Komodo Edit has everything you need. As for speed, it's slow to start up but after that it's as fast as any other "lightweight" editor you've used.
What about the editor that comes with ruby-one-click for windows? Would it work? (the one written in ruby).
There is also gvim or vim if you are feeling adventurous.
JetBrains RubyMine
I did not use this program, but "System Requirements" did not indicate requirements for Java Runtime Environment in Windows version.
Related
I´m having a hard time configuring NetBeans for Rails3 in Windows. I got a lot of problems, many o then reported even here.
So my question is: which of the following IDEs are best situated for Rails3 in a Windows Box right now:
RubyMine
Komodo IDE
RadRails
Look, i dont want to start a discussion (kinda x vs y). I just want to know from people who already are developing in Rails3 with Windows what is the better choice in the long run.
Thanks!
EDIT
Issues with NetBeans
Issue 1
Issue 2
Note: Im using RubyMine by now and facing no problems
I'm using
RubyMine.
You can try it for free for 30 days. Before my time with RubyMine, I've used NetBeans for Rails too. But I have to say RubyMine is the money worth.
I like Redcar. Very beautiful IDE, similar TextMate
When I develop Rails on Windows, I use Aptana RadRails or Aptana Studio (pretty much the same thing). They are a little bit heavyweight, but I like the Eclipse interface in general. It often does better at syntax highlighting and autocorrecting than TextMate and has vastly better keyboard shortcuts. The TextMate/Mac fanboys are probably going to come after me for saying that. If you have plenty of memory to spare, Aptana is the way to go.
I use RubyMine, but their Java IDE has a free community edition with a Ruby plugin, which does have of what RubyMine does, FWIW.
Though to be honest, you will probably get a lot of responses saying no IDE... VIM, Emacs etc...
Aptana looks good. But I think RadRails supports only Rails 2. Aptana studio 3 Beta has a full fledged Rails 3 interface.
Also Aptana solves many RoR installation issues in Windows (which can get very messy) . So I think aptana is the way to go
I like RubyMine, as it's pretty fast and does a great job.
I wrote up a brief description of some popular editors as a part of my P2PU course. Scroll to "Choosing a Programmer's Editor" on the week 1 curriculum.
Starting with an IDE can definitely get you started, especially one like RubyMine since it's mostly cross platform.
However, learning an editor like Vim or Emacs has other benefits like being able to be completely cross-platform. More importantly, they're lightweight both in disk space and in memory usage. While using an IDE might assist in you learning a language (because you get syntax completion, documentation, etc), learning an editor can lead to the kind of power usage that one using an IDE can only dream of (but it will take a while to get to that point on something like Vim or Emacs).
e-texteditor would be a good choice.
Does any one know good editor available in RoR for windows?
If you fancy an IDE, there is Netbeans, Eclipse (Through the RadRails plugin I believe), Aptana, RubyMine*. If you want a more Textmate-ish kind, there is E-Texteditor *, Notepad ++. There is also VIM or EMACS, I think. I don't have a windows machine, so I can't verify that, but how could there not be.
I've hand some experience, on the mac side, with the IDEs available. But, I find them very "heavy". This could be because I'm on a Mac, so you might get a better experience with those since your on Windows. I'm think it has do with the way each OS supports JVM.
*Must pay for these, at least last time I checked.
Netbeans IDE
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I'm starting a new job soon where I'm going to be developing in Ruby and Rails on a Windows machine. I haven't used Windows for years, and the likes of Textmate, Git and Bash, are an integral part of the workflow using a Mac.
So, does anybody have any suggestions or recommendations as to the best tools or work strategies to use? Or pitfalls to avoid?
In particular, of course, I'm interested in the best text editor. (I'm seriously thinking about taking the opportunity to learn Vim or Emacs, or whatever the Windows ports are called, but any other thoughts would be welcome.)
Additionally, any ideas of useful plugins, tools or programs would be appreciated.
If you think that I've completely lost my mind, then feel free to tell me too ;-)
cheers !
Ruby and Rails
RubyInstaller for Windows
RubyStack installer for Windows
Rails
Development Environment
IDEs
RubyMine
NetBeans
Aptana RadRails
Text Editors
Sublime Text 2
e (aka TextMate for Windows) (seems to have been abandoned)
Vim/Ruby
bash Environment
Cygwin
Source Control
Git
Helpful Links
Setting Up Rails Development Environment on Windows XP
RubyonWindows Blog
Is Windows a First Class Platform for Ruby?
Related Questions
Why is ruby so much slower on windows?
Limitations in running Ruby/Rails on windows
Will using an IDE with Rails hinder me?
GUI editor for Ruby in Windows
What IDE / Editor do you use for Ruby on Windows?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/826164/a-definitive-list-of-ides-for-ruby-on-rails
Ruby On Rails with Windows Vista - Best Setup?
https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=ruby+on+windows
RubyMine is supposed to be a top notch IDE. JetBrains always makes great products.
NetBeans or e as IDEs
Here's my incredibly detailed setup guide for Windows Server 2003, which works essentially unchanged on XP Pro and Vista. See this general installation list, and modify the instructions if you get different results. They're meant for people new to programming, so they'll probably be overly explicit for your purposes.
IMO, the one thing you definitely need is a *nix-style shell. This has nothing to do with whether you like dir or ls - you need to be able to run shell scripts or you won't get very far.
git bash (comes with msysgit) is my beacon in the storm of cmd.exe windows. It's essentially bash on Windows, and lets you run almost any script that you can run on *nix. This includes all the gem command line executables.
It gets weird in a few places.
File permissions - there just isn't a great way to map between Windows ACLs and POSIX file permissions. The Cygwin people have devoted years to solving it, but it still doesn't work all the time. git bash's approach is to just not do anything when asked to do a (for example) FileUtils.chmod. That means you may need to create a few more directories by hand, and you do need to be very aware of when something is changing file permissions.
For example, when I installed the Heroku gem on Windows, it tried to set the permissions of my Heroku credentials file, which has my Heroku password in plaintext, to u+r go-rwx. You'd definitely want to change the ACLs on that file if you're on a shared machine.
Scripts vs. .bat files - I wanted to change git's default editor from vi to SCiTE (not that I don't like vi; this was for a new-user workshop and I didn't want to explain editing modes). I had to create a .bat file that was actually a shell script. See the full explanation here:
How can I set up an editor to work with Git on Windows
I am using Netbeans, which is a good overall editor (at least for me).
For simple projects I use JEdit.
You can find the link at
NetBeans IDE
You can find JEdit at JEdit
git is available on Windows: http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/ or http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Git_on_Windows
Basically, you need to decide whether you are going to go the Cygwin route or the MingW route. Both will provide you with Bash as well.
GVim works great. I use the native port rather than the Cygwin version.
If your development life is switching to Windows then you may want your employer to invest in this:
Ruby In Steel by SapphireSteel Software
I've used it in the past when I started tinkering with Ruby on Rails, quite nice and reasonably mature now. Also it's built on Visual Studio which I still think is one of the premier development environments around.
Maybe bring a LiveCD to work with you every morning..
you can even put it on a usb flash drive, if you use a small enough distro/big enough drive...
Cygwin as command line tool
The two best RoR IDE's I've used are NetBeans and Aptana Studio. However, for the most part I stick with Notepad++ and its various plugins (Explorer and HTML tags being two important ones).
This may not be applicable in your situation (IT restrictions, etc), but another option might be virtualization. You could install VirtualBox, VMWare, or some equivalent, and run Ubuntu (or your preferred Linux distribution, of course) that way, gaining access to the full UNIX toolset.
You didn't say whether you're using Windows voluntarily. However, this line suggests to me that maybe that's the case:
"If you think that I've completely lost my mind, then feel free to tell me too"
If you have any choice in the matter, I strongly recommend using a Unix-based system instead of Windows. If you have to go through inconvenience, spend money, or jump through hoops to avoid doing Ruby/Rails development on Windows, it will be worth it.
I've had to cope with Ruby and Rails on Windows a lot recently due to legacy systems and other developers' preferences. Rails development on a Unix-based system is much more efficient. The difference is not subtle.
That said, as others have mentioned, installing mysysgit even if you aren't using Git is helpful because it comes with Git Bash which gives you a usable bash command line.
As for text editors, I like Notepad++.
NetBeans is a really nice IDE for Rails development. Decent syntax highlighting, code completion, error highlighting. Handy keyboard shortcuts for navigation. It's pretty good.
IntelliJ IDEA
I developed in RoR under Windows for a few years, it's bearable, but Linux (or Mac) is much better for this. Lots of gems and plugins are considerably harder to install on Windows (quixml, for example).
My favorite text editor under Windows is Textpad, Eclipse is also pretty good.
If you want to use ls, find, grep... in Windows console, just download some package of their Win32 ports, install them and add to your PATH (Cygwin is definitely better, but also harder to install). You might also try out Powershell, it's supposed to be a replacement for unix command line by Microsoft.
I use virtual box, putty, and xming to do the development in an isolated linux environment. I blogged the full setup here
I've struggled a lot with Rails development on Windows. At some point I needed a specific gem that didn't work on Windows. I prefer working with a VM using Vagrant
Here's a blog post I wrote, how I setup my projects with the use of Chef and Vagrant
I got myself a new 8 gig USB key and I'm looking for a decent solution to have a portable RoR environment to learn on. I did the google on it and found a few possibilities, but I'm curious to hear some real life experiences and opinions. Thanks!
I like InstantRails, very easy to use, no installer, and does not modify your system environment.
InstantRails was replaced by [BitNami RubyStack] in 2007.
http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack
How to create a portable environment based on RubyInstaller's binaries and Development kit:
http://hcettech.blogspot.pt/2012/05/windows-portable-rails-development.html
Related: Portable Ruby on Rails environment for Windows
Setting up a portable install of Cygwin would be a good choice.
You'll have a full *nix environment which would give you endless possibilities. You could easily have Ruby, Rails, Mongrel (or whatever server of choice) as well as a really good editor at your disposal as well. I would recommend VIM with this Rails specific VIM configuration (fantastic looks and feel!).
I currently have a similar setup running Cygwin off a jump drive. I use it mostly for the bash shell, VIM, and using tail to monitor development log files with its nicely color coded syntax.
I found this, and I intend to give it a go this evening:
Flash Rails
Assuming you're on Windows, I'd go for Instant Rails and Netbeans (with a JVM for Netbeans).
Netbeans is a bit heavy-weight, but it supports lots of nice rails focused IDE features and is the best IDE for Rails on Windows IMO.
You'll get all of that on a lot less than 1 gig.
I currently use TextMate for all my Rails development, and I like it very much, but I wonder if I'm missing anything by not using an IDE. Has anyone switched from using TextMate or another powerful text editor to a Ruby IDE? Am I missing anything?
JetBrains, the people who created the legendary IDEA IDE for Java, have RubyMine in beta. DHH has mentioned it, so it must be good!
TextMate is king for Development on Mac, it's not too bloated and has so many good bundles made by the developers that use those particular languages. Can't be beat in my opinion.
I think IntelliJ/RubyMine is pretty good because I've been coding Java for a while. There's some feature holes for Rails development, but I expect that Jetbrains will quickly fix those in coming versions.
I just got turned onto Textmate because my laptop is a Powerbook 12" G4. Running IntelliJ is pretty snappy, but it makes the fans run constantly with a volume approaching "airplane engine". Working with Textmate keeps my laptop quiet.
In my opinion textmate is the best IDE if you have a Mac. It is highly customizable and you can pretty much do everything you want with it. Plus a lot of developers are using textmate for rails and therefore creating scripts and features that you can import and use.
I'm using Aptana with radrails when I'm on windows, but it's not as good. Plus you can't customize it as much. The other issue is that since it's based on eclipse it's quite ressource intensive and from my experience it's not as stable as textmate.
Aptana has some cool features, like being able to call script/generate and rake tasks directly from the interface, but this is something I could live without.
Aptana RadRails is one of the best Ruby IDEs out there, with Rails support, HTML editors, etc. It is a plugin for Eclipse, and is also supplied standalone.
I use Netbeans because I like the test support and test coverage features combined with the fact that I can use it for multiple languages & environments. They really try to provide a complete environment but I find I still have to step out to the command line a lot - starting thinking_sphinx, running cucumber, tailing logs etc.. so it is never quite comprehensive. It is also slow as hell on my slow as hell laptop.
I used the eclipse rails plugin for a while and it is also pretty good but Netbeans had a pretty good feature surge for 6.5. that won me over.
If you're on Windows you may want to look at "Ruby in Steel"
I've just found it and have not worked with it much nbut the experience so far is good. So if you use VisualStudio for your job this may be a nice addon to help get Ruby into the same environment.
On a mac it is probably not worth it as TextMate is very optimized for Rails development through bundles. I did use AptanaIDE when I was on Windows though. The main problem here is not the IDE itself but the fact that it is not useable (as in snappy enough) on the machine I had. And strangely enough for a Ruby programmer I believe that a program that makes editing unformatted text feel sluggish on a 1Ghz/Gbyte machine is doing something wrong.
Has anyone switched from using TextMate or another powerful text editor to a Ruby IDE? Am I missing anything?
Yes, I recently switched from Vim to RubyMine. (And I also used TextMate before that.) Personally I think the tradeoff is worthwhile, because of how well designed and well implemented RubyMine is. So the quality of the tool makes up for the heavier footprint.
The things I felt I was "missing" with Vim included well-implemented code completion, open files by typing partial filename, click on a symbol to go to the declaration, and a lot of other stuff.
I really like Komod for Ruby and Python development.