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Ruby

Posted by Chris Rodriguez
Chris Rodriguez
3,872 Points

Learning Ruby - IDE

So I am new to the Ruby world. Interested to find out what is the best FREE Ruby IDE to start with?

Thanks, Chris

6 Answers

Marcus Tisäter
Marcus Tisäter
4,886 Points
Marcus Tisäter
Marcus Tisäter
4,886 Points

Sinatra is great for web applications :)

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

Sinatra is a web framework not an IDE

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

Any text editor will work just fine. Notepad++ will work just fine as will TextWrangler. As a general rule most Ruby programmers tend to use lightweight text editors instead of full IDEs.

Jon Wood
Jon Wood
9,884 Points
Jon Wood
Jon Wood
9,884 Points

I've grown to like Sublime Text, myself.

You also have RubyMine, but it is a paid product. There is a free trial, though, and that company makes great products.

Marcus Tisäter
Marcus Tisäter
4,886 Points
Marcus Tisäter
Marcus Tisäter
4,886 Points

Oh I missunderstood the question. Sorry! Rubymine is a great tool, but I think any editior is ok for ruby :)

Chris Rodriguez
Chris Rodriguez
3,872 Points
Chris Rodriguez
Chris Rodriguez
3,872 Points

Cool! Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

I have become accustomed to 'Sublime Text' for use in CSS/HTML/JQuery. I think part of the Learning process for me, is understanding what is required vs. what is preferred in building a Ruby application.

Is an Integrated Development Environment different from a Text Editor? I may have gotten those two confused...forgive me, I'm a Graphic Designer and 3D Artist :p, so many programming terms are occasionally foreign to me.

My initial interest in Ruby was lead by the fact that Sass/CSS requires you to install Ruby..for some reason.

Jon Wood
Jon Wood
9,884 Points
Jon Wood
Jon Wood
9,884 Points

No worries, man, we're all here to learn. :]

My opinion on the text editor vs IDE thing is that an IDE has quite a lot of other big features that help you along the way, such as code completion, refactoring tools, etc.

Michael Nickey
PLUS
Michael Nickey
Courses Plus Student 13,524 Points
Michael Nickey
Michael Nickey
Courses Plus Student 13,524 Points

Sublime is great! I love it. I've grown to start using RubyMine more and am really enjoying it. It's daunting to use at first during the setup & honeymoon phase but once you sink your teeth into it it's really nice. One thing that I like about RM over sublime is that I can actually execute these programs from within RM. Sure it's just a shell for terminal now but for me that's better than two applications open.

RM has a 30 day trial so I'd recommend downloading both and giving them both a try. You can't really go wrong with either of them in fact I'd even throw in there Textmate.With TM & TM2 you can also run the code in the same program including specs for TDD.

It's all really personal choice, just likemost of life. G'luck

RM: http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/ Sublime: http://www.sublimetext.com/ Textmate: http://macromates.com/