I’ve been searching for the right editor for ruby and rails. It needs to be lightweight, have syntax highlighting and ‘feel’ right. In effect, I wanted TextMate for windows.

Now I’ve found it: e . It’s in beta, with a rapid release cycle. Try it, it’s ace.

second that, i’m loving e.

I’ve been a Textpad user for years. It allows user contributed syntax highlighting plugins (so you can customize if need be). There is a plugin for Rails already. While I haven’t used Textmate, I think Textpad is comparable to TextWrangler on OSX.

Check it out at Textpad

This is a discussion which could go on for ever, but in case it helps anyone: I’ve tried a number, inluding UltraEdit / UeStudio and JEdit. I’m currently exploring RadRails, which is a plugin for Eclipse. I’m just starting to learn about Eclipse, but so far it’s one of those ””why didn’t I find out about this years ago”” experiences :)

I tried RadRails and found it to be overly down and very, very sluggish. I wasn’t in love with the fact that I would have to wait for it to ‘import a project’ instead of pointing it at my Rails application directory and having at it. I have found the beauty of a simple text editor with syntax highlighting, file browser pane and tabs to be far less cumbersome. As I have moved to using Ubuntu where I can that would be Gedit…. but when forced to use windows I go for RIDE-ME which is also open source and since the majority of you are .NETers it’s written in C#. So if you see something you don’t like grab the source from the repo modify it and commit it for all to benefit

I am also looking for a textmate like editor (textmate is amazing…). I have found InType, its still in beta but looks promising… i am already using it.

That does look good, AG. Pretty impressive… it looks almost exactly like TextMate. Curious as to where this one goes.

I use a custom setup of Eclipse that I put together before RadRails came out… I packaged it up last June so that others could use it instead of building it themselves, but it’s still Eclipse, which means it can be slow. (http://www.napcs.com/products/rails/Eclipse/index.htm). I’m probably going to discontinue this one now that Radrails is getting closer to complete.

But I really like RoRED as well.. it’s really nice and the developer has some great ideas. (http://www.plasmacode.com/)

Finally, I really like Notepad ++ as a general editor. It understands Ruby syntax, though it’s not great with RHTML yet. (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm)

Also watching InType, but e looks really cool as well.

Nobody using our IDE, Ruby In Steel http://www.sapphiresteel.com ? We have a free one as well as the commercial “Developer Edition”. The free one is RC 2 at present but will magically become version 1.0 in a few days…

Well, it’s not free for me cos I don’t have Visual Studio. I need to rectify that so I can include Ruby in Stell in my book though.

I only wish Microsoft would make it possible to load other languages into VS Express. Alas, this isn’t possible. If it were, we’d love to give away the whole thing for free.

I’ve just finished a significant upgrade to our IDE, ED for Windows to include Ruby language support. I’ve written a Blog post at: http://blog.surfulater.com/2007/02/21/write-ruby-code-faster-with-ed-for-windows/ which will give a good overview of ED’s capabilities with a specific focus on Ruby.

I welcome and look forward to your comments.

Neville Franks, http://www.getsoft.com

Don’t forget Ruby.Netbeans – ruby.netbeans.org

Awesome debugging & code completio support.

Missing a colourized log viewer :(

Just to bring this up to date…

I’m pleased to say that we’ve just launched Ruby In Steel The Text Edition. It costs $49 and comes with its own copy of Visual Studio 2008 at no extra cost… ;-)

More info here: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-Text-Edition

best wishes

Huw

Just to bring this up to date, we are just about to launch our visual designer for Rails – this has a drag+drop page designer and it can construct full HTML pages from ERb templates (and vice versa). This will be integrated into the forthcoming update to Ruby In Steel Developer (v.1.2). There’s some info on our site now:

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Visual-Rails-Workbench-Preview

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Visual-Rails-Workbench-The-Import

I’ll do some more in depth demos of the drag+drop designer and round-trip ERb template/HTML code translation in the coming week.

best wishes Huw