Ruby IDE

ruby-talk
1

I am new to Ruby, but I have used a lot of other
programming languages including Python, Ada, C++,
Java, etc.

I downloaded Ruby to my Windows machine and installed
it by executing the self-install file (a .exe). An IDE that
came with it, FreeRide, does not seem to work at all. The
editor, SciTE seems pretty useless.

Is there an IDE that actually works that one can use to
develop and compile Ruby. I am guessing there is since
so many people are using it.

Thanks in advance,

Richard Riehle

2

adaworks@sbcglobal.net wrote:

Is there an IDE that actually works that one can use to
develop and compile Ruby.

Here we go again.

Try and search the archives? There have been previous discussions on the
topic. The topic alone tends to cause the signal-to-noise ratio to
decrease though, so some wading through opinionated rants is required.

(By the way, you don't need to compile anything, so a text editor -can-
cover the tiny part of the development cycle that I audaciously guess
you have only used of your IDEs.)

David Vallner

3

All I use is SCiTE and I've been writing ruby code for nearly two years.

···

On 12/17/06, adaworks@sbcglobal.net <adaworks@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

I am new to Ruby, but I have used a lot of other
programming languages including Python, Ada, C++,
Java, etc.

I downloaded Ruby to my Windows machine and installed
it by executing the self-install file (a .exe). An IDE that
came with it, FreeRide, does not seem to work at all. The
editor, SciTE seems pretty useless.

Is there an IDE that actually works that one can use to
develop and compile Ruby. I am guessing there is since
so many people are using it.

Thanks in advance,

Richard Riehle

4

adaworks@sbcglobal.net wrote:

I am new to Ruby, but I have used a lot of other
programming languages including Python, Ada, C++,
Java, etc.

I downloaded Ruby to my Windows machine and installed
it by executing the self-install file (a .exe). An IDE that
came with it, FreeRide, does not seem to work at all. The
editor, SciTE seems pretty useless.

Is there an IDE that actually works that one can use to
develop and compile Ruby. I am guessing there is since
so many people are using it.

Thanks in advance,

Richard Riehle

Some more IDEs for Windows are: ArachnoRuby, Komodo, Eclipse with Ruby
Development Tools, Visual Studio with Ruby In Steel, RadRails (Eclipse
based, Rails focused).

There seems to be some confusion though: You don't compile Ruby. The
Ruby interpreter executes your source code directly. So other than
syntax checking, integrated help, and syntax highlighting, an IDE
doesn't buy you much. Fortunately, you have "ri" (command-line tool),
"fxri" (GUI version of "ri"), the Firefox Ruby Sidebar, ruby-doc.org,
gem_server (command-line tool to start a local-webserver to view the
RDocs for installed gems), for help (and that's just the shortlist).

Don't forget the power of just dropping into irb and typing:
(MyClass.methods - Object.methods).sort

I use that form of "help" more than anything else these days.

Syntax highlighting is a must IMO, but the UltraEdit syntax snippet is
good enough for me.

Frankly, I recommend _against_ an IDE for Ruby. It's not because there
aren't good ones either. After a bit of adjustment Komodo is a pretty
polished package. ArachnoRuby is great too, though I think it may be a
"dead" project, and has a few quirks. But I don't use class-browsers,
integrated unit-testing suites, etc. There's a command-line equivilent
for each of those with Ruby, and they're a lot more convenient than
learning 5 different ways for 5 different IDEs. So for me at least, I
appreciate the speed dropping a file into UltraEdit, making a quick
change, and saving gives me. I can go through that whole cycle in a
fraction of the time it takes Visual Studio 2005 + Resharper to load on
my work computer...

5

<adaworks@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:HSdhh.6748$Gr2.2195@newssvr21.news.prodigy.net...

Is there an IDE that actually works that one can use to
develop and compile Ruby. I am guessing there is since
so many people are using it.

You don't mention if you are a Visual Studio user. If so, you may want to
try out our IDE, Ruby In Steel, which provides a full range of Ruby and
Rails editing, project management and debugging tools for VS.

best wishes
Huw Collingbourne

http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby Programming In Visual Studio 2005

6

Try

FreeRIDE

http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl

Bye

7

Hi,
after following this discussion for a few days, I decided to do a
little writeup on the various IDEs that are used for ruby editing.
You can check it out at
http://concentrationstudios.com/2006/12/19/ides-text-editors-and-bears-oh-my

···

On 12/17/06, adaworks@sbcglobal.net <adaworks@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

I am new to Ruby, but I have used a lot of other
programming languages including Python, Ada, C++,
Java, etc.

I downloaded Ruby to my Windows machine and installed
it by executing the self-install file (a .exe). An IDE that
came with it, FreeRide, does not seem to work at all. The
editor, SciTE seems pretty useless.

Is there an IDE that actually works that one can use to
develop and compile Ruby. I am guessing there is since
so many people are using it.

Thanks in advance,

Richard Riehle

--
Chris Carter
concentrationstudios.com
brynmawrcs.com

8

adaworks@sbcglobal.net wrote:

Is there an IDE that actually works that one can use to
develop and compile Ruby.

You could try the Zeus for Windows IDE:

   Zeus IDE - Programming environment for Windows developers
   Note: Zeus is shareware (45 day trial).

It does Ruby syntax highlighting, code folding, class browsing,
macro scripting, integrated version control, smart indenting,
project/workspace management etc etc.

You can even write Zeus macros using Ruby :wink:

Jussi Jumppanen
Author: Zeus for Windows

9

Sam Smoot wrote:

There seems to be some confusion though: You don't compile Ruby. The
Ruby interpreter executes your source code directly. So other than
syntax checking, integrated help, and syntax highlighting, an IDE
doesn't buy you much.

Like integrated unit test support.
Project management.
Debugging with source code navigation.
Semantics-aware code templates.

No, not much, unless you actually learn to use one effectively.

But I don't use class-browsers,
integrated unit-testing suites, etc. There's a command-line equivilent
for each of those with Ruby, and they're a lot more convenient than
learning 5 different ways for 5 different IDEs.

Erm. The thing is you pick an IDE, stay with it, and use one way to
consume those things only instead of keeping idiosyncracies of
command-line interfaces in your head.

Also, this is too strongly an issue of personal work patterns to be
preached, and I find it irresponsible to mention that without a big YMMV
disclaimer.

I can go through that whole cycle in a
fraction of the time it takes Visual Studio 2005 + Resharper to load on
my work computer...

How often a month do you need to load an IDE again? Twice?

David Vallner

10

"delta11" <delta11NOSPAM@email.it> wrote in message
news:39ihh.6144$BR1.3784@tornado.fastwebnet.it...

Try

FreeRIDE

http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl

Actually, I tried FreeRide, but it doesn't seem to work.

When I invoke it, it simply flashes onto the screen and
instantly vanishes.

I appreciate the comments. Perhaps I should be a little
more clear. Or, perhaps I need to understand Ruby
a little better.

I do understand that Ruby is interpreted. The fxri window
works fine for console applications. The problem is that
it does not have a save option in the window.

I am having some difficulty executing my Ruby
script from SciTE.

Python, also interpreted, seems to be easier to use,
so far. I would like to use Ruby since I like the design
of the language better than Python.

I must be missing something in trying to set up the
environment. It is probably so easy that I am just
making it hard because of my experience with so
many other languages.

Richard

11

You can get all of the above and more (like integrated RubyDocs) with
the acclaimed JEdit (www.jedit.org) which is free and has a Ruby plugin
(http://rubyjedit.org/\). It is quite lightweight and works great on
Windows - I have been using it for Ruby/Rails dev for about a year now.
I suggest using the Project Viewer plugin also which gives you the
workspace view.

Vish

jussij@zeusedit.com wrote:

···

adaworks@sbcglobal.net wrote:

> Is there an IDE that actually works that one can use to
> develop and compile Ruby.

You could try the Zeus for Windows IDE:

   Zeus IDE - Programming environment for Windows developers
   Note: Zeus is shareware (45 day trial).

It does Ruby syntax highlighting, code folding, class browsing,
macro scripting, integrated version control, smart indenting,
project/workspace management etc etc.

You can even write Zeus macros using Ruby :wink:

Jussi Jumppanen
Author: Zeus for Windows

12

Twice a month??! I'm not going to name any names, but here goes...

Ideally you would keep your IDE open all the time. But in practice things
are often less than ideal. As intellijent as these things are, they are also
often very memory and disk intensive and eclipse your computer's resources.
I have the good fortune of using two rather heavyweight IDEs during the
course of my daily work and I find that on average I have to restart at
least once a day due to bugs, corrupted local histories and other general
wonkiness.

That's not so bad, but sometimes there are legitimate usage patterns that
become a real pain. For example, if you're working on several different
projects each day, all of them large-ish codebases, then you probably don't
want to keep them all open at the same time. Closing and reloading projects
in the IDEs that I use is no quicker than a full restart.

I hope I've been vague enough that no one has a clue which IDEs I am talking
about. Apart from the above issues, they are quite quite excellent. So I
don't really have any preferences on the text-editor vs IDE issue.

Mushfeq.

···

On 12/17/06, David Vallner <david@vallner.net> wrote:

Sam Smoot wrote:
> There seems to be some confusion though: You don't compile Ruby. The
> Ruby interpreter executes your source code directly. So other than
> syntax checking, integrated help, and syntax highlighting, an IDE
> doesn't buy you much.

Like integrated unit test support.
Project management.
Debugging with source code navigation.
Semantics-aware code templates.

No, not much, unless you actually learn to use one effectively.

> But I don't use class-browsers,
> integrated unit-testing suites, etc. There's a command-line equivilent
> for each of those with Ruby, and they're a lot more convenient than
> learning 5 different ways for 5 different IDEs.

Erm. The thing is you pick an IDE, stay with it, and use one way to
consume those things only instead of keeping idiosyncracies of
command-line interfaces in your head.

Also, this is too strongly an issue of personal work patterns to be
preached, and I find it irresponsible to mention that without a big YMMV
disclaimer.

> I can go through that whole cycle in a
> fraction of the time it takes Visual Studio 2005 + Resharper to load on
> my work computer...
>

How often a month do you need to load an IDE again? Twice?

David Vallner

13

Not to mention the ability to get a comprehensive view of the structure of
a system (inheritance hierarchies, client relationships, subsystems, class
interfaces [public methods and specs], etc.) as an aid in refactoring or
adding components. It's pretty hard to do that from the command line.
(Not sure if any Ruby IDEs can currently do this, but it's so useful, I
suspect it will be available in a few years.)

···

On 2006-12-17, David Vallner <david@vallner.net> wrote:

--------------enigDE8C94F1688FE918C543A3A4
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Sam Smoot wrote:

There seems to be some confusion though: You don't compile Ruby. The
Ruby interpreter executes your source code directly. So other than
syntax checking, integrated help, and syntax highlighting, an IDE
doesn't buy you much.=20

Like integrated unit test support.
Project management.
Debugging with source code navigation.
Semantics-aware code templates.

--

14

David Vallner wrote:

Like integrated unit test support.

Meh? What's a couple keystrokes? Does that really help you be more
productive? I've used TestDriven.NET quite a bit, but I don't think
twice about test integration with Test::Unit.

Project management.

Why would I want Gantt charts in my IDE?

Debugging with source code navigation.

You have a point here. I've lived without it, but it would be a plus.
Am I willing to trade speed for it though? Probably not.

Semantics-aware code templates.

You don't need an IDE for this.

No, not much, unless you actually learn to use one effectively.

Ouch.

Erm. The thing is you pick an IDE, stay with it, and use one way to
consume those things only instead of keeping idiosyncracies of
command-line interfaces in your head.

Lucky you. I'm not seeing how "IDE idiosyncracies < command-line
idiosyncracies" though. Plus I work on Linux, Macs and Windows. So a
unified set of tools available on every platform is really nice. ri,
gem_server, irb, Test::Unit, etc give me that. TextMate > AnythingElse,
so I manage with UltraEdit on Windows and Vim on Linux. :slight_smile:

Also, this is too strongly an issue of personal work patterns to be
preached, and I find it irresponsible to mention that without a big YMMV
disclaimer.

Fair enough. YMMV. It's just opinion. It's not like it's going to hurt
you to learn the command-line tools. Frankly, any Rubyist that doesn't
know how to use "ri", "irb", "gem_server", etc is doing themselves a
big disservice IMO, IDE or not. Whatever floats your boat though...

How often a month do you need to load an IDE again? Twice?

VS2K5 + Resharper eats enough RAM with a few browser windows,
query-analyzer, and folders open that having two solutions open at once
burns through my work computer's 2GB of RAM pretty quickly and makes
things sluggish.

I think the reason why we don't see much refactoring support is that
it's just not needed. That's just my opinion tho'.

15

"adaworks" typed:

"delta11" <delta11NOSPAM@email.it> wrote in message

Try
FreeRIDE

Actually, I tried FreeRide, but it doesn't seem to work.

When I invoke it, it simply flashes onto the screen and
instantly vanishes.

Perhaps the environment PATH variable does not contain a path to the ruby
binary. In my experience, FreeRide showed similar behaviour and not
work when I had installed Ruby on a different partition under windows. It
was a PATH problem.

···

--
Ayaz Ahmed Khan

It is impossible to defend perfectly against the attack of those who
want to die.

16

"delta11" <delta11NOS...@email.it> wrote in messagenews:39ihh.6144$BR1.3784@tornado.fastwebnet.it...> Try

> FreeRIDE

>http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.plActually, I tried FreeRide, but it doesn't seem to work.

When I invoke it, it simply flashes onto the screen and
instantly vanishes.

I appreciate the comments. Perhaps I should be a little
more clear. Or, perhaps I need to understand Ruby
a little better.

I do understand that Ruby is interpreted. The fxri window
works fine for console applications. The problem is that
it does not have a save option in the window.

I am having some difficulty executing my Ruby
script from SciTE.

In SciTE save your scripts with the "rbw" extension, which seems (I
don't especially understand what's happening - this just works!) to
help SciTE to capture the output from print statements. Failing that,
try working in the text editor of your choice - anything that
understands Ruby syntax should be adequate - and run your scripts from
a CMD window.

Python, also interpreted, seems to be easier to use,
so far. I would like to use Ruby since I like the design
of the language better than Python.

Interesting. I came to Python second and struggled to come to terms
with it after Ruby - it always seems less flexible and syntactically
less rich somehow. Perhaps a Python-oriented IDE might help - I never
felt that about Ruby.

If you really want an industrial-strength IDE (what were you using for
Python, I wonder?) then Ruby In Steel for Visual Studio is certainly
interesting.

I must be missing something in trying to set up the
environment. It is probably so easy that I am just
making it hard because of my experience with so
many other languages.

I suspect you've inadvertently managed to get off on the wrong foot! Of
the dozen or so languages I've found myself working in over the years,
Ruby is the one I'd most like to spend my days working in. Keep at it!

Mike

···

On Dec 18, 4:24 am, <adawo...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

17

Mushfeq Khan wrote:

Ideally you would keep your IDE open all the time. But in practice things
are often less than ideal. As intellijent as these things are, they are
also
often very memory and disk intensive and eclipse your computer's resources.
I have the good fortune of using two rather heavyweight IDEs during the
course of my daily work and I find that on average I have to restart at
least once a day due to bugs, corrupted local histories and other general
wonkiness.

Weird, that didn't really happen to me on IDEA yet.

That's not so bad, but sometimes there are legitimate usage patterns that
become a real pain. For example, if you're working on several different
projects each day, all of them large-ish codebases, then you probably don't
want to keep them all open at the same time. Closing and reloading projects
in the IDEs that I use is no quicker than a full restart.

Oi, talk about pots and kettles. I've never had the scenario of having
to split work time between projects and shamefully oversaw it.

Obviously, the solution is to keep all projects open at once, switching
between the windows (or more probably virtual desktops) and pester your
employer for more RAM :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

David Vallner

18

Sam Smoot wrote:

David Vallner wrote:

Like integrated unit test support.

Meh? What's a couple keystrokes? Does that really help you be more
productive?

Yes. I've switched from Eclipse and 250 dollars + VAT to IDEA precisely
because they add up. It's also not only about the less time spend
typing, but about keeping the flow of your development cycle fluid and
without mental context switches.

Project management.

Why would I want Gantt charts in my IDE?

Not THAT meaning of project management. I meant keeping track of what
files belong to which project, or keeping track of interrelated
projects. Being able to only specify this dependency and never have to
bother with library load paths is one more thing utterly unrelated to
the code itself that you don't need to keep in your head, which is a
Good Thing.

Semantics-aware code templates.

You don't need an IDE for this.

An IDE implemented in Emacs Lisp / vimscript still is an IDE. Though
this specific feature doesn't have much to do with the main focus of
IDEs, that's providing uniform access to a set of tools, it is true that
what you commonly call IDEs usually implement more extensively
code-aware editing features.

Erm. The thing is you pick an IDE, stay with it, and use one way to
consume those things only instead of keeping idiosyncracies of
command-line interfaces in your head.

Lucky you. I'm not seeing how "IDE idiosyncracies < command-line
idiosyncracies" though. Plus I work on Linux, Macs and Windows. So a
unified set of tools available on every platform is really nice.

Surprisingly enough, cross-platform IDEs are not unheard of in the 21st
century. It's also missing the point, the issue isn't that a given
toolset isn't available on a platform, rather that there is an impedance
mismatch between the different tools. How easily can you look up
documentation for some element you see in the debugger or irb? I
consider a copy/paste operation as something that takes too long for this.

Also, this is too strongly an issue of personal work patterns to be
preached, and I find it irresponsible to mention that without a big YMMV
disclaimer.

Fair enough. YMMV. It's just opinion. It's not like it's going to hurt
you to learn the command-line tools. Frankly, any Rubyist that doesn't
know how to use "ri", "irb", "gem_server", etc is doing themselves a
big disservice IMO, IDE or not. Whatever floats your boat though...

No, it's not going to hurt. I know how to use them, I know how to use
their equivalents in all the other programming languages I regularly
use, I just find them suboptimal. I also use ruby-doc.org instead of ri
because of the cross-referencing.

I think the reason why we don't see much refactoring support is that
it's just not needed. That's just my opinion tho'.

No, it's just mind-bogglingly hard to implement. Refactoring means the
operation must be nondestructive with regards to semantics, and it's
very difficult for a program that isn't a Ruby interpreter to
sufficiently reason on Ruby code. And because of late method binding,
even the interpreter doesn't know ahead of time for example what a given
method call might invoke. But that's digressing.

David Vallner

19

First off has there been any talk about what price range the full version of
ruby in steel is going to fall into?

What happens if you want to develop a gui application using Ruby is one
expected to draw the gui in one program and write the code that makes it
work in another? I think the integration of form designing tools are a
major strength of an IDE personally. I tend to do most of my ruby coding on
Linux systems and I prefer Emacs but one major issue I have with Emacs (and
Vim) is that I seem to be spending an exorbitant amount of time trying to
get things like snippet.el, and cedet to actually work; so much so that I
have had to all but give up on getting those things to work if I am going to
get anywhere on the project I am trying to write at the moment. The net
effect being I end up being far less efficient with respect to typing alone
than I would be if it was easier to get those plugins working or they were
built into emacs already.

The more I try to use Emacs for Ruby the more I find myself wanting to use
an IDE that is at the very least on par with Visual Studio and hopefully
better than Visual Studio if only to focus more on typing the code for my
project and hopefully learning more about ruby in the process rather than
trying to configure the editor component in vain.

Do any of these IDE's mentioned support active line highlighting? (The
current line is say yellow so it stands out against everything else.)

···

On 12/18/06, Mike Woodhouse <mikewoodhouse@gmail.com> wrote:

On Dec 18, 4:24 am, <adawo...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> "delta11" <delta11NOS...@email.it> wrote in messagenews:
39ihh.6144$BR1.3784@tornado.fastwebnet.it...> Try
>
> > FreeRIDE
>
> >http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.plActually, I tried FreeRide,
but it doesn't seem to work.
>
> When I invoke it, it simply flashes onto the screen and
> instantly vanishes.
>
> I appreciate the comments. Perhaps I should be a little
> more clear. Or, perhaps I need to understand Ruby
> a little better.
>
> I do understand that Ruby is interpreted. The fxri window
> works fine for console applications. The problem is that
> it does not have a save option in the window.
>
> I am having some difficulty executing my Ruby
> script from SciTE.

In SciTE save your scripts with the "rbw" extension, which seems (I
don't especially understand what's happening - this just works!) to
help SciTE to capture the output from print statements. Failing that,
try working in the text editor of your choice - anything that
understands Ruby syntax should be adequate - and run your scripts from
a CMD window.

> Python, also interpreted, seems to be easier to use,
> so far. I would like to use Ruby since I like the design
> of the language better than Python.

Interesting. I came to Python second and struggled to come to terms
with it after Ruby - it always seems less flexible and syntactically
less rich somehow. Perhaps a Python-oriented IDE might help - I never
felt that about Ruby.

If you really want an industrial-strength IDE (what were you using for
Python, I wonder?) then Ruby In Steel for Visual Studio is certainly
interesting.

> I must be missing something in trying to set up the
> environment. It is probably so easy that I am just
> making it hard because of my experience with so
> many other languages.

I suspect you've inadvertently managed to get off on the wrong foot! Of
the dozen or so languages I've found myself working in over the years,
Ruby is the one I'd most like to spend my days working in. Keep at it!

Mike

20

David Vallner wrote:

Sam Smoot wrote:
  

David Vallner wrote:
    

Like integrated unit test support.
      

Meh? What's a couple keystrokes? Does that really help you be more
productive?
    
Yes. I've switched from Eclipse and 250 dollars + VAT to IDEA precisely
because they add up. It's also not only about the less time spend
typing, but about keeping the flow of your development cycle fluid and
without mental context switches.
  

It should also be noted that mental context switches, distractions, interrupts, and other flow-breakers are partly the responsibility of the developer - manager human interface. You can have the best IDE in the world, but if you don't have the clout to keep everyone elses' monkeys off your back, you might as well have a coding pad and a room full of keypunchers for an IDE. Just another musing from the 40+ crowd. :slight_smile:

I think the reason why we don't see much refactoring support is that
it's just not needed. That's just my opinion tho'.

No, it's just mind-bogglingly hard to implement. Refactoring means the
operation must be nondestructive with regards to semantics, and it's
very difficult for a program that isn't a Ruby interpreter to
sufficiently reason on Ruby code. And because of late method binding,
even the interpreter doesn't know ahead of time for example what a given
method call might invoke. But that's digressing.
  

Actually, I think it's strongly on-topic! I don't typically use IDEs because I work on small things that are for the most part well-defined and self-contained. I consider the Windows or Linux desktop an IDE, though -- I really *don't* use a coding pad any more. :slight_smile: But for the command-line geeks out there, assume

1. a *large* multi-programmer pure Ruby project,
2. a *mandated* set of coding standards,
3. a *mandated* single IDE that everyone *must* use

Given that, what would that IDE need to be able to do?

···

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.