From: Curt Hibbs <curt.hibbs@...>
Date: 2005-10-17T13:07:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Editing in Ruby

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Its true that autocomplete is a difficult proposition in a dynamic language=
.
There is work being done on this, but nothing yet that is any good. Anyway,
don't expect to find usuable autocomplete anywhere in the near future.

I disagree that IDE advice, though. One of the nice things you can get from
the current batch of IDEs is code navigation -- a hierarchical tree that
graphically shows you the modules/classes/methods of the file being edited,
and you can click on one of these to navigate to that element in the code.
This makes it easy to see the structure of the code you are editing.

FreeRIDE has this, so does the RDT plugin for Eclipse (both are free).
Arachno Ruby, while being a commercial product, does this very well.

Curt

On 10/16/05, Jacob Quinn Shenker <jqshenker@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There are things that do that... but why?
> Ruby is a very different language than Java and .Net, which sometimes
> rely on the IDE too heavily. For Ruby, you don't need autocomplete.
> Actually, because Ruby is such a dynamic language, a *good*
> autocomplete is virtually impossible to make. My advice: try to use an
> editor instead of an IDE or IDE-like environment with autocomplete and
> the like. Experiment with Vim or Scite for a while, you might like it.
> I did, and I swore by autocomplete for Java before learning Ruby. Just
> my $.02!
>
> Jacob
>
> On 10/16/05, Shreyas <sravi2k4@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all --
> >
> > I just started reading up on programming in Ruby. I used to program in
> > VB / VB.NET <http://VB.NET>, and have done some programming in Java, et=
c
> etc. In any
> > case, I am looking over the basic "how to program in Ruby" tutorials on
> > the web just to get a general idea of how this programming language
> > works, and I was wondering if there was any editor out there that had
> > "autocomplete," i.e., one that will automatically give me a list of
> > functions for the object in question whenever I type in the '.', and
> > also give me the tooltips once I start a function.
> > I installed the one-click Ruby installer (I'm running this on WinXP),
> > and it gave me a copy of SciTE, but it looks like I need to point it to
> > a text file listing the entire ruby API, and I don't know where to find
> > that (I've tried Googling for it, but to no avail). I also have
> > installed RDE, and FreeRide comes with the installer too (but, of
> > course, FreeRide seems to run on top of Scintilla).
> > In any case, I was wondering if anyone knew either (a) how to get a
> > list of all the functions in ruby exported to an API file, or (b) if
> > there is an editor out there that can help out. Many times when I'm
> > programming, it's nice to just be able to see what the valid functions
> > are for the object in question, rather than having to look it up in the
> > API documentation.
> >
> > Thanks!
> > Shreyas
> >
> >
> >
>

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