Just to more publicly call out a correction from the comments here and elsewhere, yes, I forgot about RDT when writing up my JRuby, Sun, and a Ruby IDE post from yesterday.
Apologies to the RDT folks. The slight by omission wasn’t intentional, just some foggy brain action on my part.
I actually used RDT a around a year ago when Charles and I were pair-programming on (what was then) the Ruby project that became Freestyle. Back then, if I recall, it was primarily syntax highlighting, but it also had unit test running, which impressed me quite a bit at the time for how new the project was. And yes, I’ll do my penance and check out RDT more fully real quick-like, as we say down here in Texas.
Of course, in thinking about the topic, it seems like the de facto IDE for Ruby — at least among the vocal crowd — is TextMate. I like TextMate myself and after several rounds of playing with it have switched to using it for all my plain-text needs instead of my old stand-by, emacs.
The problem there is that TextMate is OS X only. So, while I’m lucky enough to work on OS X and, among many other apps, use TextMate, I’m eager to see the further evolution and growth of a cross-platform Ruby IDE for those who are on other platforms.
And, to use another Texanism, maybe the RDT crew will fix that all up ;>
Disclaimer: Eclipse, which RDT runs in, is a client. As is Sun.
emphasis on the de facto, i'd say, or am i wrong in my understanding the TextMate is merely a text editor, rather than a full fledged IDE?
RadRails, for example, embeds features for the generate actions, starting and stopping WEBrick, etc – does TextMate do that?
i actually forgot, but when i was doing screenshots for AIGLX it was RadRails running in the background:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sog/234004887/
Yup, very much so, emphasis on the de facto when compared to the likes of Eclipse or NetBeans.
That said, TextMate has more than just plain-text editing and syntax highlighting in it. It's very much so like emacs in that there are many different "bundles" chock full of macros and things like "run as unit test" (like modes, major and minor, in emacs), including one for Ruby and one for Rails.Here's one write-up; I was going to upload a screenshot, but flickr's being pissy.