Software Development | Ruby on Rails
Which RoR Editor or IDE on Windows

Most Ruby on Rails developers use TextMate as an editor. But TextMate is only a Mac thing. So I'm exploring what to use on Windows.

I just did a survey of the editor of choice amongst the Web Developers at work; ok they're not Ruby on Rails guys but close enough. The list includes Notepad++, Eclipse, Coda, SciTE, Komono, DreamWeaver, and TextMate (oops that Mac). It seems that different people have different preferences and even use different editors for different jobs.

RadRails

Personally I like all-in-one IDEs so RadRails appealed when I first installed Ruby on Rails a couple of years ago. RadRails is built on top of Eclipse so RadRails, like Eclipse, is a one stop shop for features: editor with syntax highlighting etc, command line, script generators, database view. On the down side it has a big foot print on the disk and is a beast to load.

See Installing RadRails on Windows.

NetBeans

I'm currently playing with NetBeans (Ruby).

Notepad++

I've started using Notepad++ at work for looking at JavaScript and HTML so I'm also trying this for Ruby on Rails. I've added these Notepad++ plugins to help:

  • Explorer
  • HTML tags
  • WebEdit

There is an Light Explorer plugin but this lacks several of the features of Explorer (e.g. add folder) for little apparent benefit. 

For the plugins download:

  • the DLLs into C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins\
  • any INI files go in C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins\Config\ 

You'll have to restart Notepad++ to see the new plugins.

RubyMine

RubyMine has poor reviews so I've not looked at it.