Netbeans Intellisense for Rails

Question

Has anybody figured out a way to make the Netbeans intellisense for ruby and rails better? It either has too many options in the list (which I understand is a problem since it is a dynamic language). Or it has no options in the list, as if it is not dynamic enough to find everything.

Are there any hacks to make it better, or is this just something that needs to be improved within the Netbeans source code? I'm currently using 6.8.

Please spare me the posts about how I don't really need to use intellisense, and I should use vim or emacs. I'm sure the vim programmers are 10 times more productive than me with all their cool shortcuts, but I have no desire to learn these tools.

Answer 1

It has to be improved by the Netbeans team. There's nothing you can really do to help it.

[edit: oh, and you can have code completion with Vim, so .. You should use Vim! :p]

Answer 2

if you click on options, in tools and select options. Then go to miscellaneous tab, and select ruby.

enable extended type interface (may be slow) check on for methods.

I tried doing this it is giving me better intellisense with methods like p, and protected methods as well.

I am using netbeans 6.8 and I suppose this would offer you better intellisense.

Answer 3

There's been improvements in 6.8, but it's still far from perfect, and you mentionned you are already using 6.8.

You might want to try RadRails - can't tell you if their code completion is better though (I'm a NetBeans user), but I seem to recall reading it was.

Answer 4

I'm with you on intellisense. If you're on a Mac, you might try Coda from Panic. It has better intellisense than either RadRails or Netbeans for Ruby/Rails IMHO.

Answer 5

Sadly you just have to wait. I read that Oracle is now focusing NB on scripting languages, and there were plans afoot to add most of what you are talking about to 6.9. You can check out the nightly builds here: http://bits.netbeans.org/download/trunk/nightly/latest/ They've already hit milestone 1.

Answer 6

I haven't gotten to play with Ruby and Ruby on Rails in NetBeans 6.9, but one of the features touted by the Release Notes was improved code completion in dynamic languages (Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and Python). You might want to consider upgrading (if you haven't already) and checking it out.