The last RadRails version 0.7.2 was released 3 months ago and it seems the RadRails-Team members are spending their time on other things. RadRails isn’t feature complete yet and there are still many bugs bugs waiting to be fixed.
And honestly, I don’t like to work with software, which needs some work but isn’t under maintenance/development any more.
So I (again) took a look at other Rails editors/IDEs to try out. After playing around with vim and emacs I decided to give emacs a try.
On my laptop with Ubuntu Edgy I installed a CVS version of emacs from here:
http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~ghoseb/apt-edgy/
(Maybe I could have used the packages from the Ubuntu repository too – I’ll give them a try later)
Then I added some functionality by installing the ruby-elisp package and the rails.el emacs extension.
Finally I polished the interface by following this howto to get anti aliased fonts and using another color theme. (Here I used the emacs-color-themes package)
After all, I had a very nice and powerful Rails editor.
I’ve uploaded some screenshots here.
I will try it out a bit more. But I can say it’s a lot faster than RadRails (it doesn’t need java) and when you know the most important key-shortcuts, it’s very cool to work with it.
Does anybody also use emacs? Which extensions do you use?
Looks interesting, I will give it a try. It’s a shame, that RadRails isn’t beeing developed at the moment.
I am a Java developer, but don’t have the time (and willingness) to get into that Eclipse Plugin Framework right now.
You can also have a look at Intype (http://intype.info/blog/), which is Windows version of Textmate (THE RoR editor for the Mac).
currently it’s in alpha state, but it looks nice and has good color scheme and TAB-completion support.
I have used RadRails since 0.7.1. It is a decent IDE but as you’ve mentioned really needs some more work. It is a shame to hear they aren’t working on it anymore.
I still haven’t found anything better than it though.
Emacs is amazing. You have to spend some time with it (reading the online documentation, looking around, experimenting with different things. Once you “get it”, though, there’s no turning back!
Check out rinari, which adds some nice features missing from the rails.el package.
Also check out this blog post by Steve Yegge:
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs.
Full of good advice.
And once you get comfortable with navigating documents (and moving from one to another) in emacs, you’ll find also that emacs keybindings are ubiquitous. I’ve even got emacs keybindings as I type these words! (Firemacs)
Do participate!