Today I stumbled back into the NetBeans Ruby Wiki, expecting to just find the same old "how to download", "how to install", and "how to build" instructions. Instead I find a nicely-organized set of pages describing (with screenshots!) all of the really awesome features.
Refactoring? Check. Debugging? Check. YAML and RHTML editing? Check. Test running? Check.
It just goes on and on.
If you haven't given it a try, and you're a Ruby programmer, you owe it to yourself to check it out. And if you ph34r a gigantic IDE download with support for Java and UML and BPEL and other stuff you'll never used, there's a Ruby-only IDE available too; check the Installation page. Incredible.
Direct links to feature pages:
- RubyEditing describes the editing features available.
- RubyRefactoring describes the refactoring features available.
- RubyProjects describes the project features available.
- RubyOnRails describes the Ruby On Rails features available.
- RubyDebugging describes the debugging features available.
- RubyTesting describes the testing features available.
- RubyCodeTemplates describes the live code templates feature.
- RubyHints describes the quickfixes and hints feature.
- RubyShortcuts lists keyboard shortcuts relevant to Ruby
I've been using Netbeans 6 for Ruby for some time now and I can confirm that it is just awesome. by far the best out there.
ReplyDeleteI finally said goodbye to XEmacs for Ruby.
Agreed, I've switched to Netbeans as well, definitely the best Ruby IDE implementation out there at the moment. I wouldn't mind a proper graphical (auto)test runner, though :)
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, it's sooooo great. You have to go through 10-12 different panels to get at the screen to add the .rsel files (or anything that NB doesn't think is ruby) just to find out--no Tiffany, there is no breakfast. Add the file in the list of "Extensions and Mime/types" and suddenly...
ReplyDeletepoof. No more rsel files (even in files view).
I'm going to declare that ANY editor that uses a white list to manage its files is horribly broken and DOES NOT help the programmer manage files.
Don't matter how fancy your damn refactoring is.
Wait a minute...did you actually try all these features out, or just read about them on the wiki?
ReplyDeleteSo I switched to Netbeans recently from Eclipse/RadRails. And the verdict is...it "sort of" works. Method completion and Go to Definition work OK.
The bigger problem is all the things that *don't* work, many not specific to Ruby. The SVN plugin is pretty crappy and unreliable. Various short cuts work about 50% of the time.
And the thing is dog slow. About half as fast as Eclipse. All that being said, I'm still using Netbeans. It's just enough of an improvement over RadRails to be worth it. If they could fix some of the notable bugs and improve the speed, then I'd recommend it more highly.
--scott persinger
Are you using the latest nightlies? They're fixing bugs one after the other for the final 6.0 release. Keep in mind this isn't a final release yet :)
ReplyDeleteEvery month or so I download the latest nightly build of NetBeansRuby. Every time I spend about 20 mins trying to even get to a Ruby editor... to no avail. The complaints are different every time, either I don't have Rails installed (it's in vendor/rails) or I don't have the Ruby interpreter (it's in a non-standard place). And so on and on...
ReplyDeleteI'm sure it's great, but I think I'll wait for the GA release before I try again. :-)