From: "Rob ." <rob.02004@...>
Date: 2005-12-09T03:35:04+09:00
Subject: Re: What's your opinion? ArachnoRuby, Komodo, Eclipse/RDT, RadRails, etc.

On 12/7/05, Curt Hibbs <curt.hibbs@gmail.com> wrote:
> Of the IDEs that you have actually used. What are your
> favorite features of each one (especially those you find
> essential), and what things or omissions do you find
> annoying?

I use the jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin (http://www.jedit.org/ruby/) for
editing Ruby, most recently for a Rails project I'm working on.

Essential:
- Syntax highlighting and syntax error checking.
- Edit history navigation: I can recurse back over my edit location
history with a keybinding.
- Auto indent and insert end: on hitting the enter key it adds the
'end' keyword if necessary and indents your code as appropriate.
- Source code available under the GPL license.

Other favourites:
- Integrated RDoc viewer: easy browsing of RDocs for system types,
main stdlibs, and Ruby on Rails code.
- Quote and bracket completion: adds closing quotes, etc
- Structure browser
- Type-based code completion: good in the situations when it works,
shows docs in RDoc viewer as you cursor up and down the completion
popup.
- Progressive selection: good for incrementally selecting code with a
keybinding.
- Extract variable refactoring: available in an upcoming release. ;)

Favourites from core jEdit or other plugins:
- Split panes
- Autocompletion of HTML/XML elements via XML plugin
- XPath expression evaluator via XSLT plugin
- Visual diffs via JDiff plugin
- Project managment via Project Viewer plugin

Don't use so often:
- File structure navigation popup: good for quickly navigating the
structure of unfamiliar Ruby code
- Scope highlighting
- Code folding
- Code markers

Annoying:
- Code-completion doesn't always recognize that it's in a position
where it should be able to complete code, seems to occur when at the
end of a long line of code.

Cheers,
Rob

Disclaimer: I'm currently the sole author of the jEdit Ruby Editor
Plugin. However there have been over 7,000 unique visitors to the
download page, an average of 30 a day. I'm not tracking actual
downloads at present.