What should I use for a Ruby development environment on Windows?

Question

Hi,

I am playing around with Ruby in Windows using Notepad++ and the console but am finding this extremely inconvenient due to the lack of tabbed consoles.

Any recommendations for a more comfortable environment?

Answer 1

Aptana Studio. It's built on Eclipse. I use it on Windows and I love it.

Answer 2

For a tabbed console, try Terminator.

Answer 3

SapphireSteel have just released a free version of their dev environment: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-New-Free-Edition

Answer 4

Another replacement for Windows' awful console is Console which downloads, unzips and runs. It's mostly a CMD clone with a lot of the worst nonsense dealt with: better editing, tabbed sessions, some graphic effects. That turns out to be a lot. Throw in some suitable DOSKEY macros and it really isn't too bad at all.

Answer 5

Netbeans is the only IDE that has serious ruby integration. Aptana isn't being maintained and is kind of crappy anyway. Netbeans has a very smooth and deep integration--ruby is treated as a first-class language, not some cheap add-on.

I tried quite a few. Most Ruby people seem happy with a text editor like Notepad or TextMate.

Answer 6

Vim is a great editor for any language, and there are some excellent scripts/plugins for Vim to enhance Ruby development.

Answer 7

There's also some ruby support in Intellij IDEA (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/ruby_rails.html). I haven't tried it but if it's as good as their Java integration it'll be well worth a look.

(Incidentally, this query is 3 hours old and no-one has mentioned Emacs yet - I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!)

Answer 8

I use either Jedit or Vim

Answer 9

I used Aptana for about a year before I switched over to E Texteditor. It's like Textmate for windows.

For console, I use PowerCmd. Works great!

Answer 10

My Setup:

• Rails / Mysql on a linux box (we have a dedicated box, but I'd use a virtual machine if not) - windows ruby is really a poor cousin to ruby on linux/osx, and I believe that your development environment should match production (linux/freebsd) as closely as possible.

This really defines the rest of the setup. IDE's with integrated debuggers aren't very useful because they all assume native ruby running on the local machine (which it isn't)

• Putty for SSHing to the linux box - I typically have about 4 open at once

• HeidiSQL for poking around in the DB - for testing queries and so forth

• Samba on the linux box and a mapped drive on the windows side to access the files.

• E-TextEditor - It's awesomely great

• Beyond Compare 3 for diffing/merging - again, awesomely great

• TortoiseSVN - TortoiseSVN over samba is terribly slow, so I don't actually use this for commits/merges or anything serious. It is worth having though just so you can right click on a file and do 'svn diff'

Answer 11

emacs of course!! Barring that aptana is pretty good.

Answer 12

I used Aptana for a while, and I was impressed with the way the platform was growing. They've been doing a very nice job with it overall, especially since they took it over from RadRails. However...

Decided to give NetBeans another try after I had to work on a Java project for the first time in a couple of years, but it's basically taken over as my everything IDE since then. The Ruby and Rails integration is really good and always improving, but it's the overall user experience of the editor and surrounding tools that seals the deal for me. There are a few things I'd like to see added, but overall, I'm really impressed by what's there.