Netbeans for the win!
September 7th, 2007 | 0 comments
I have been meaning to write an article about netbeans + ruby for awhile, and anyone who knows me has probably heard me talk about it - it's great, it's fast, and it actually just works.
However, somebody else saved me the trouble, infrid over at http://lifeonrails.org wrote an epic post about it, comparing to other editors and listing off some of the good features - you can read his post here, titled netbeans, the best ruby on rails ide
Some things he didn't mention, or I missed, are the quickfixes, refactoring support, and some useful plugins - Tor posted about the spellcheker , which I don't like - but in the same post he mentions two nice ones - highlight tabs and highlight trailing spaces. Not really important, but nice to see when somebody slips a tab into your code and it jumps out in bright red, as well as the trailing spaces being a light grey - with the option to trim them all. More useful of a plugin is the continuous integration notifier, which just adds a little green (or red, when the build fails) icon in the status bar for each project. There are lots of other plugins too, available in the plugin manager - you don't have to go download anything manually.
Quick fixes are likely nothing new to anyone who's used an IDE before, but they are new to a Ruby IDE. There is a list of them as well as a video of tor demoing them. From what we've been told, this list will continue to grow - but go check out the list, it goes over them all.
The refactoring support in Netbeans for ruby is limited, but allows for things like proper renaming, and again promises to be something that will eventually be fleshed out more.
There are lots of other things too, like if you declare a variable but never use it, it's visually notifies you (just different color syntax highlighting) - but there are so many little things like that it's not worth going over - they are small, but they amount to a lot!
Newly launched is netbeans.tv, a site for community videos relating to netbeans - there are tutorials, interviews, etc. Worth checking out!