Text Editors for Rails (p38)

E Text Editor is a TextMate clone for Windows; it supports TextMate bundles, and as such, it now supports the latest Rails 2.0 Textmate bundle. It also automatically installs + uses cygwin for access unix cmds etc.

Thanks!

I would like to ditto e-text editor as being a fantastic clone. It costs money, though. When do we get our *nix TextMate, gentlemen?

I would like to third e-texteditor. I have tried a lot of editors for rails (jedit, radrails[not the new one however], a bunch of others i can’t remember) and e-texteditor has been by far the best.

E-Text Editor Rocks… have only just been using it and heaps easy to use. highly recommend this editor.

I found netbeans 6.1 is also awesome. Pretty easy to use to too, with easy generate.

Aptana Studio

Totally awesome with RadRails plugin plus the new cloud will have support for really simple deployment

Netbeans 6.1 might be OK for experienced programmers but this newbie found it slow and confusing and slow.

Can’t go wrong with JEdit however I did have to edit the modes\catalog.xml file to add html.erb to the rhtml glob and add rjs to the ruby glob.

There’s a good review of the Ruby/Rails IDE/editors at: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/11/26/Ruby-Tool-Survey
I personally prefer NetBeans-6 for my Rails projects (for I love its good SVN support and fine code completeion). But to make small changes in 1 or 2 source files, I use Kate editor under Linux. Or sometimes, gedit…

I always use NetBeans 6.1 for Rails. It’s really awesome and no, it’s not complicated! actually it’s really easy for begginers too.

Started with Textmate … switched to NetBeans 6.1, and thanks to its superb subversion integration and debugging features, I’m staying put :)

I came across a newer review, in which 9 IDEs for RoR are compared: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/07/28TC-ruby-ides_1.html
BTW, the only “Excellent”/9.0 mark was given to my favourite NetBeans IDE. :-)

I’ve tested many editors as well. For Windows looks like e-texteditor is well quoted, but imho inType (although in alphas stages and slow development pace) wins e-texteditor for the following reasons:

1. Small footprint > very fast and light: the developers are very keen to this detail

2. Does not rely on cygwin > the developers are into avoiding bloated software

3. Future inType versions will use Javascript API

I believe inType has a better potential than its competitors.

I find E to be a lackluster product. Its regular expression handling is much inferior to TextMate (basically, my regexps work in TextMate but often not in E). Also E is very slow.

I recommend EditPad Pro. It is no IDE (and doesn’t support TextMate bundles) but it suits me and is relatively lightweight.

Anyone using VIM or eMacs? ... I just installed VIM, but the learning curve will be very steep, plus I´m not sure if these kind of editors are the right ones for RoR development. If you ask a hardcore unix user he probably will say yes, but it looks like passion for the editor than enything else. Some links:

1. http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoUseVimWithRails
2. http://rails.vim.tpope.net/

I´m using Windows and although inType or e-texteditor are good candidates they´re still buggy imho … unfortunately there´s no real textmate for windows … i don´t consider e-texteditor finished yet …

Some may say to use IDEs, but I hate them so…

I attempted to use NetBeans 6.1 but found it too complicated. I spent a week just trying to code the sample applications in various Rails books. I decided to switch to Instant Rails with e-TextEditor & have been having a much easier time. I think the problem is documentation. The vast majority of reference material for Rails uses something other than NetBeans. So when you want to code something in NetBeans you have to spend a bit of time trying to learn how to reproduce the results in an application that at times sounds nothing like your reference material. Other than the lack of NetBeans-specific documentation, I think it will eventually be a good tool for Rails. It was great for Ruby, although a bit slow at times.