Can you recommend an IDE for Ruby outside of SU on Windows?

lewiswadsworth · 21 Jun 2008, 00:28

Assuming I live that long, next spring I've been asked to teach an advanced SketchUp course for architects that would include Ruby scripting in a big way. So I've decided to review the language in the most comprehensive way possible, both in and out of SU, and I'm working my way through the most recent version of "the Pickax."

Does anyone here use an IDE for Ruby (on Windows...there are some decent ones built-in to Ubuntu Linux) outside of SU? SCite ships with Ruby 1.8, but it seems very limited in niceties aside from auto-folding. I've been using RDE ( http://homepage2.nifty.com/sakazuki/rde_en/index.html ) for the last day or so, and it seems adequate and does "beautify" code, but there is some unclear language in the manual. And I've been spoiled by the really polished IDE for the Processing (Java) language, which auto-indents, auto-embeds, prompts to close brackets, embeds referenced files, beautifies code, and whatever ( http://processing.org/ ). Anything like that around for free or a small sum for Ruby?

Thanks--Lewis

todd burch · 21 Jun 2008, 02:13

Netbeans is good, and comes with a built-in debugger. Free.

Todd

lewiswadsworth · 21 Jun 2008, 02:23

Thanks, Todd. I'll try it out tonight.

The only issue I see is the size of Netbeans, ultimately about a half gig...98 MB for the IDE (Ruby only), plus another 400 MB for JDK runtime...not a big deal on my workstation with its terabytes, but a lot of space on something small like that Asus eee subnotebook I like to carry around.

GreyHead · 21 Jun 2008, 08:21

The free version of Aptana Studio might be worth a look. The feature set keeps on changing and it seems to promote Ajax at the moment but there is (or eas) a perfectly competent Ruby development environment included in the package with many of the features you mention.

Bob

lewiswadsworth · 21 Jun 2008, 13:49

@greyhead said:

The free version of Aptana Studio might be worth a look. The feature set keeps on changing and it seems to promote Ajax at the moment but there is (or eas) a perfectly competent Ruby development environment included in the package with many of the features you mention.

Bob

Thanks, Bob. I'll try it as well on a workstation. Just the download is 98MB without the Ruby plugin, which means this too is a bit heavy for the subnotebook...it may be that I will just have to stick with RDE or SCite for the Asus eee after all.

tbd · 21 Jun 2008, 13:56

funny thing, I tried last night Aptana - it has some nice features, but for me is waaay to bloated/slow.

nowadays I play with SublimeText coded by an ex-google. as it is at the beginnings it doesn't have all the cool tricks, but it is extensible via python scripts (if Ruby were available I would jump in to write some specific Sketchup thingies)

another one that I keep an eye on is Intype

lewiswadsworth · 21 Jun 2008, 14:58

@unknownuser said:

funny thing, I tried last night Aptana - it has some nice features, but for me is waaay to bloated/slow.

nowadays I play with SublimeText coded by an ex-google. as it is at the beginnings it doesn't have all the cool tricks, but it is extensible via python scripts (if Ruby were available I would jump in to write some specific Sketchup thingies)

another one that I keep an eye on is Intype

Sublimetext looks very nice, and it is very small at 11 MB installed...smaller than RDE in fact. And it's only $59, which is not that bad. I'll give it a shot and see how the features work out...thanks, TBD.