Quest For The Best Ruby On Rails Development Editor

...that is also easy to use and learn

Vim is powerful, popular and helps lots of developers to be more efficient programmers. However, because Vim forces you to work in a different way to most other editors/IDE’s, it has a relatively steep learning curve and requires the developer to spend a few weeks to learn how to use it (that I’ve done) and more time to master it (that I have not found time for yet).

I therefore mainly use Jedit when programming, and use Vim when jedit is not available (say on someone else’s computer) or when I need to quickly edit a file and I’m already in the terminal.

I am currently in the process of setting up a new Ubuntu laptop, and thought now would be a good time to make sure I am using the best editor/IDE for RoR programming.

Since writing this post I have switched to mainling using Sublime Textmate 2 on a Macbook, and occasionally using Sublime on Ubuntu, and rarely using Vim and hardly ever using Redcar and Jedit. I’d say that untill Redcar becomes better supported Sublime is the way to go.

What others say

I started by having a look around for other’s suggestions. As you’d expect there are lots of people advocating their favourite, with at least ten front runners. For an idea of what I mean, and/or a list of suggestions with screenshots and intro’s, see here

Redcar caught my eye as it seems to have lots of useful features (good auto-completion, plug-ins, and all the others like syntax-highlighting and auto-indentation) and looks easy enough to get into and learn. I also like the Textmate-like styling and way of doing things, even though I’ve never actually used Textmate. It must be Ryan Bates’ influence.

Since writing this post I have started using Sublime Text 2 more and Redcar less, mainly because Redcar is not yet a 100% finished project making Sublime Text slighlty more conducive to quick and painless development.

Install the Redcar Editor

As mentioned here and in the installation wiki you’ll need java to run/install redcar as its a JRuby application.

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre

Then to install it, all I had to do was:

sudo gem install redcar

and then:

redcar install

Redcar installed and opened. If it does not open after installing, try redcar in the terminal.

Using Redcar for the first time

Launch Redcar (see above), then use Open a Directory (see the File menu or use Ctrl+Shift+O) to open your project’s folder. The folder tree should open, if it does not check this behaviour is set in Preferences (F2).

From there you can open files and edit them. I have never used Textmate, but if you have you should find that everything works as you’re used to. That’s because Redcar is based on Textmate (it’s Textmate for Linux).

Shortcuts

I love that you can quickly open files by pressing Ctrl+T and typing the first few letters of the file name. I didn’t love that the shortcut for deleting a line was Ctrl+Shift+K (K for Kill line). So the 2nd thing I did was to change it to Ctrl+Shift+D (D for Delete line), as I’m used to duplicating lines with Ctrl+D and deleting them with Ctrl+Shift+D. For the rest of the shortcuts I’ll try to learn them as is, as it’ll mean I can switch to or borrow other computers and environments without feeling lost.

To change shortcut keys, use the Keyboard Shortcuts tool in the Help menu, or edit key_bindings.yaml which you can do in Preferences (F2).

Note

Ctrl X (cut) will delete a line if nothing is selected. The kill (delete) shortut is useful when deleting multiple lines (select text across multiple lines and execulte this command).

Word Wrap, Margin, etc

The next thing I did was to set the Margin Column character count and to turn on Show Margin and Word Wrap. I’m liking how redcar handles margins and auto-complete, but after trying out Word Wrap I find that more often than not I do not use it. Luckily Redcar remembers this setting for each project/directory you open, so you can set this up per project (e.g. based on the type of project).

Edit multiple lines simultaniously

I played around with auto-complete and suggestions in a ruby file, and tried out block-selection to comment out multiple lines, or to edit multiple lines in other ways. To do this, use Ctrl+B to toggle block selection, select the lines you want to edit and type away.

Note

Block selection does not work with word wrapping.

.gitignore

I needed to add .redcar to my .gitignore file. Better yet, add it to your global gitignore file, like so:

Create the global gitignore file, in this example called gitignore_global

git config --global core.excludesfile '~/.gitignore_global'

Then edit the file, and include what you want to ignore, for example:

*~
.redcar