Ask HN: What Rails IDE do you use?

RadRails works well for me. Its really about how familiar you get with the program, and how much you customize it to suit your coding habits (and how much you prefer the mouse).

Customizations that I use/advocate:

1) Get or make a good color scheme for syntax highlighting.

2) bind arrow keys to ctrl+i|j|k|l. I bind j&l to next and previous words and ctrl+; to end of line, and it works so well I did that to Word and notepad++ too (you really don't need ctrl+i for italics...). The only problem is that I tend to open up my downloads tab (ctrl+j) when I'm composing emails in firefox.

3) Edit -> Open resource Open resource is the MAIN reason why I use RadRails. I map it to ctrl+shift+o, and it makes switching between files extremely fast, which is important in rails since you have so many files all over the place.

4) Other notable key bindings that are useful: - maximize window - close all but current file - Search (through all the files) - Duplicate file

For me, having a clean workspace is crucial as well as getting to places quickly. My customizations reflect this, but I'm sure you can do that to many other IDEs. The exception is NetBeans - their open resource is using a bubble sort or something incredibly slow and they're not caching it either...

TextMate user #719.

vim