From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2011-01-01T02:01:48+09:00
Subject: Re: editor for newbie

On Friday, December 31, 2010 08:25:24 am ccc wrote:
> I've just started to play with Ruby. I'm using Windows XP. What is the
> best text editor/IDE to use?

Try them.

> I have good experience with vi, intermediate experience with emacs,
> and have used a number of others such as TextPad, Eclipse, and (sorry)
> Visual Studio.

Of those, vim and Eclipse are probably your best bet. I don't know anything 
about TextPad, really.

The important thing is syntax highlighting. If you can get things like 
debugger integration and other IDE-like features, great, but most Ruby stuff 
is designed to be independent of any sort of IDE, so I'd even learn towards 
something like vim -- you want to be familiar enough with the language and 
whatever platform you're building on that you're not tied to any particular 
editor.

Disclaimer: I use Kate on Kubuntu, and I'm thinking it's time for a change 
myself.

> Also and especially for vi and emacs, hints and suggestions about
> configuring the editor for Ruby.

Well, vim comes with decent out-of-the-box support. Here's my .vimrc:

filetype plugin on
filetype indent on
syntax on
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set lbr
autocmd FileType ruby set ai sw=2 sts=2 et

The crucial thing is for the ruby stuff to use two spaces to indent. That's a 
pretty consistent convention in the Ruby world.