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Comment by mjuhl24 | Hacker News Reader

Any suggestions on an alternative IDE?

http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/

Eclipse also has support for Ruby, no?

Sort of sad to see this happen, but I'd prefer they keep netbeans going and streamline it to be really good at a few things, rather than being 'ok' at lots of stuff.

Ruby doesn't really fit with Oracle's offerings, although PHP doesn't either. Perhaps PHP support will be dropped in the future?

Ugh, I hope not. I've wedded Netbeans to my PHP development process (and projects) rather tightly so the thought of having to switch (especially to something I find inferior like Eclipse) makes me nervous.

I hope not too. It's a good solid PHP platform, and a nice alternative to Zend Studio for most scenarios.

I agree that Eclipse isn't the ideal IDE for PHP (or anything that's not java), but I don't mind it too much. Maybe it's just because I've gotten used to forcing it to do what I want.

I would love to know why you think netbeans is inferior to eclipse? Perhaps for Java, it's a different story, because Eclipse is so much better than NB.

The number one reason would be debugging. The debugging environment as it relates to PHP with Netbeans is simpler to configure and easier to use than with Eclipse. There are other reasons but I feel they are more subjective than the debugging issue. I've tried Eclipse many times over the years and have always either gone back to the old Zend IDE (before they moved to the Eclipse platform) or Netbeans (lately) in frustration.

To be honest, I frequently use Vim for quick editing but when debugging PHP Netbeans beats Eclipse hands down.

Netbeans is open source. The plugin is open source. Oracle is simply trying to cut projects where they have no direct or indirect benefit. I'm sure they would be happy if someone else maintained the plugin. Netbeans has a growing community of plugin developers. There is a community Clojure plugin, for example:

http://www.enclojure.org

RadRails and Redmine are going to be the closest to the Netbeans Ruby support, others have mentioned those already. Something closer to the heart of many Ruby developers is Redcar. It's a text editor installed as a Ruby gem generally meant to replicate Textmate functionality.

http://redcareditor.com/

I'd love to see a cross platform variant, influenced by TextMate's design. I tried out redcar last year but it wasn't ready for primetime then. I may be confusing redcar with one of many other editors I tried out last year, I'll give it another look.

update it was redcar that I used last year, and it has improved quickly (kudos to the project team). That's a great sign. Kinda psyched to have something textmate-ish on ubuntu! The themes are pretty hot, and the bundles are chock full of languages.

Komodo Edit is a nice and very configurable light-weight editor (free): http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit A more functional IDE (paid): http://www.activestate.com/komodo-ide

I have been using Komodo for a number of languages on a number of platforms.

http://redcareditor.com/

A Ruby editor, written in Ruby, that you can extend using Ruby.

Emacs + various extensions and goodies.

This is the killer feature of tools like emacs and vi: Your vendor cannot abandon you and the code has a well-proven capability to be ported to just about any platform.

The cross-platform aspects of these tools is way undersold. I have all my config checked in at BitBucket. I can sit down at a new machine, check out my emacs configuration, tweak a couple variables if things are non-standard on the box (paths and the like), and I've got my environment completely set up, whether Mac, Windows, Linux, or something else.

"Your vendor cannot abandon you" is also true for NetBeans. Isn't the source code out there somewhere?

I completely agree with this. Emacs is an amazing environment that can be customized and extended in so many ways. It also has support for just about anything you'd ever want to do.

It's also nice that you don't have to have N dev environments installed to support each language you want to play with. I work in Java, C++, Python, Erlang, HTML, JavaScript, and Ruby fairly regularly. Installing and learning a completely new environment for each would be obnoxious.

I use TextMate, but have been trying to make the switch to vim.

Are you seeing any benefit yet? (I've tried that switch myself but I think I gave up too early).

I used it for a couple of days, then switched back to TextMate. I am going to watch the PeepCode Vim series (http://peepcode.com/products/smash-into-vim-i) and I think that will give me some momentum.

Mhh, it takes some time to get accustomed to vim but it's worth it. Just don't give up too early.

I'm using XCode and vim ... XCode for iOS development and for everything else vim. Prior to that I used TextMate ...

After a few weeks of constant vim usage it happens that I start typing vim commands into XCode (or into any other bigger text field). For example I regularly press a/i/o before I start typing the text. Or I try to block mark/yank text selections, etc. instead of use copy and paste :)

After a few weeks of regular usage you start getting a grasp on vim and will constantly ask yourself why all the other editors suck :)

(I tend to use console vim - not macvim. Macvim somehow doesn't feel right.)

I hate to lead this further off-topic, but I'm trying to get into Vim myself -- how to you approach having multiple files open? Buffers? Tabs? Windows? The netbeans/visual studio/et. al. tabbed approach has always worked well for me, and I'm finding that to be my biggest stumbling block in switching to Vim.

Try the MiniBufExplorer plugin. It gives you a list of all open files in a different buffer, and you can switch to any of them by just moving into that buffer and pressing enter while on the filename.

I use splits and vertical splits. Tabs are an option too, but I usually don't leave that many files open at once.

For browsing files inside vim I use NERDTree (or if I remember the filename :e <filename>). To quickly open the file's headerfile I use http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=31 - it takes only a :AS to open the file's header file (vice versa) in a new split. (Hint: Map a key to next split/window to switch fast between them. I remapped F1 for this purpose.)

If I really need to have many files open I just open a new tab/window in my terminal emulator. (There are also tabs in vim but I had not a chance to get used to the tab commands yet. gvim/macvim offer more abstract tab support - the tabs are real vim tabs but they are represented as UI tabs. So you can still yank/paste between them but have a more Visual Studio'ish feeling.)

If you're on Mac OS X or can run a VM, TextMate is a wonderful project editor. It was the reason I switched over to Mac for development. It does everything I want for development, and gets out of the way for everything I don't want. It'll take a little to get used to.

Autoformatting code is controlled under bundles (format all, re-indent text).

Go to definition/declaration is functionally done with go to symbol.

There's support for code completion but I haven't used it much.

RubyMine seems to be the most popular these days:

http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/

If I was doing any kind of Ruby work I would go with that. I am using PyCharm from Jetbrains for Python work and really like it.

RadRails: http://aptana.com/products/radrails (although it's Eclipse based, so it might not be what you need).

I'm wondering how come Oracle hasn't kill NetBeans yet? Considering the effort they've put into Eclipse and the aholes they are this seems a logical move.

They've been bought by AppCelerator so I highly doubt their longterm focus is going to be on Ruby. Will probably mainly be Javascript (to support Titanium Mobile)

Did you try http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/ ?

(I'm still on TextMate and happy with it, personally :)

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