February 2008
Intermediate to advanced
479 pages
14h
English
Content preview from Professional Ruby on Rails™
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A.7. Choosing a Text Editor
You'll need to type your code into something. Here are a few of options to consider.
On the Mac, TextMate (www.macromates.com) has emerged as the clear favorite among Ruby programmers. Unlike the other programs on this page, it's not free, but it is extremely powerful and flexible. It comes with a number of easily extendible shortcuts for Ruby, Rails, and Subversion.
On the Windows side, the E text editor (www.e-texteditor.com) attempts to recreate the TextMate structure, but at the time of this writing, it's not quite mature.
There are a few cross-platform text editors worth a look. Eclipse (www.eclipse.org) includes the Aptana plugin, formerly known as RadRails. At one point, this was pretty much the only game in town for Ruby syntax coloring and such on Windows, but other tools have been catching up fast. If you are already comfortable with Eclipse, this is an easy way to get a Rails tool.
NetBeans (www.netbeans.org) has just added significant Ruby support for version 6.0, with an eye toward supporting JRuby development. It's feature-rich but in a user interface that I've never quite been able to get used to. IntellJ IDEA (www.jetbrains.com/idea) has added Ruby and Rails support for version 7, but I haven't yet gotten a chance to evaluate it. IDEA is also a commercial program.
jEdit (www.jedit.org) is a Java-based text editor that contains a Ruby plugin. It's a little barebones compared to the full IDEs, but it's still quite usable.
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.