Sunday, May 13, 2007

FAQ: What text editor should I use?

Any text editor -- even Windows Notepad -- will do, so long as you can save your documents as straight text. You'll eventually want something a bit more robust than Notepad, such as the SciTE code editor that is installed by the One-Click Ruby Installer. More fully-featured code editors include the e Text Editor and ActiveState's Komodo Editor. Google for further details and recommendations.

For more answers to Frequently-Asked Questions, check out posts with the faq tag.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like ActiveState's Komodo Editor. G. I never tried it before.

Thanks

Unknown said...

I think you should mention RadRails a.k.a. Aptana as it is also a very common Rails development IDE on Windows (and others as well as it is Eclipse-based and thus multi-platform).

Anonymous said...

If you are using Visual Studio, might I suggest our IDE, Ruby In Steel - http://www.sapphiresteel.com

best wishes
Huw

David Mullet said...

Thanks for your comments!

I'll be addressing IDEs in a FAQ post separate from text editors. I already plan to mention Aptana/RadRails, Ruby in Steel, and Komodo IDE.

--David

Charles Roper said...

E-TextEditor is a fantastic, but still in (rapid) development, text editor. It is essentially TextMate for Windows. Well worth checking out. It definitely my text (and Ruby) editor of choice.

gtcaz said...

+1 to what Charles said! And now e has native windows support so you can write commands targeting either the One Click Installer Ruby or Cygwin's ruby (for all the cool Unix tools that provides).

Anonymous said...

I prefer (g)Vim from http://www.vim.org
You can get all what you want from it if you are willing to learn.

Here's a nice overview what you need for rails: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoUseVimWithRails

And there is a plug in to emulate Textmate snippets too, http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1318

Anonymous said...

ED for Windows http://www.getsoft.com has very good Ruby support.

See "Write Ruby code faster with ED for Windows" at http://blog.surfulater.com/2007/02/21/write-ruby-code-faster-with-ed-for-windows/

Duncan Bayne said...

I suggest using Emacs. Why have a different programming environment just because you're using a different language, or a different operating system?

Don said...

I've install Ruby192 on Windows 7, but did not get the option for SciTE code editor that is install by the One-Click Ruby Installer, meaning (I did not see the box to check and install SciTE, and the Ruby package manager RubyGems. When I go to |Start |Programs |Ruby192, I see Interactive Ruby & Start command prompt with Ruby, Documentation but no SciTE, also I do NOT get fxri Ruby interactive help & console...What am i missing? Most of the Ruby installation documentation mentions that SciTE and fxri as part of the installation.

David Mullet said...

@Don:

The current RubyInstaller package does not include SciTE.

You can install SciTE from here

David

Martin Graham said...

I use NetBeans and absolutely love it.

David Mullet said...

I've been using NetBeans IDE for two or three years now---for larger projects. For smaller projects, I currently use Notepad++ editor.