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I am in the process of trying to learn Ruby, however after spending nearly 10 years in the MS stack I am struggling to get by without intellisense. I've given RubyMine a try which does help however ideally I would like to go free which would mean no RubyMine.

How have other people learnt to cope with remembering everything instead of relying on Ctrl-Space? Any advice is appreciated at the moment as I am feeling very stupid (no jokes about MS devs please ;))

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I struggled with this too, and I think its a very real roadblock for anyone who wants to move from a strongly typed language to Ruby. I tried to ask a group of 3 professional Ruby devs that I was having lunch with at CodeMash this year, wondering if it was hard to keep track of other peoples naming in a team environment, and they all said "no, because we use names that make sense". It seemed like a bit of a generic answer, but... Anyway, I voted to move this to programmers.stackexchange, because it is more subjective. Hopefully someone has some good advice. – rally25rs Mar 18 '12 at 15:23
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@rally25rs: Ruby is strongly typed. – Jörg W Mittag Mar 18 '12 at 15:35
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@rally25rs I think what you mean to say is that it is not statically typed, as Ruby is strongly typed. – Andrew Marshall Mar 18 '12 at 15:55
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Good luck refactoring as well. – Ivan Zlatev Mar 18 '12 at 17:40
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I remember back in the MS Front page days some idiot bragging about how he coded all of his websites in notepad. Although that's great, and i'm sure any professional here can do that too, it's just unpractical, and to be blunt, stupid. No one needs all these fancy modern day tools, but it only makes sense to make your development experience the easiest, quickest, and most efficient as possible. All of the competition about who can write code with stone age tools is ridiculous. I say this because I've heard more than one Ruby developer brag about how they use textmate or whatever to code in. – Nick Mar 18 '12 at 20:13
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Mar 18 '12 at 15:37

3 Answers

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As a former .Net developer who is now a Ruby on Rails developer my advice would be to run ctags on your project and see about integrating it with your editor of choice. Emacs, Vim, and Sublime Text all have nice ctags support. Then you will have at least some method completion support. I work on a fairly large project with a half dozen other developers and I use Vim/ctags without any problem.

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+1: Used Ctags / EMACS for years on large C++ projects for years and found it quite sufficient. – kevin cline Mar 19 '12 at 0:09
dont forget dabbrev-expand as well in emacs – jk. Mar 19 '12 at 9:02
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I was initially using SciTe and just notepad. But it was definitely tough without intellisense, because I had to go back and forth for references. So nowadays I am using netbeans which has ruby support. One issue is that in the recent releases, they have stopped supporting ruby, but you can use the 6.9.1 version of netbeans which still supports ruby projects (and is free!). Here is the link http://netbeans.org/community/releases/69/.

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Oracle stopped supporting Ruby, NetBeans still supports Ruby just fine. In fact, since several of the original developers of the NetBeans Ruby plugin work for Google now, and Oracle is suing Google, they weren't allowed to work on the plugin while it was still owned by Oracle. As a result, Oracle dropping support actually led to better support for Ruby in NetBeans, because now the original developers are back on the development team. – Jörg W Mittag Mar 18 '12 at 16:26
Nope, Netbeans doesn't support ruby anymore. Quote from netbeans "NOTE: As of NetBeans IDE 7.0, support for Ruby and Ruby on Rails is no longer available in the standard NetBeans IDE build. Please see the Ruby Support Wiki page for more information." (netbeans.org/features/ruby/index.html). I am not exactly sure what you mean by netbeans is still supporting ruby, am i missing something here? – k25 Mar 18 '12 at 16:48
@k25 It's not part of the standard build, but it's being developed as a plugin by some JRuby folks like Thomas Enebo. They had some catch-up to do (e.g. move JRuby from 1.1.4 to 1.6.5 while keeping up with the NB 7.1 changes), but it appears to be still under active development. – Mark Thomas Mar 18 '12 at 17:49
up vote 1 down vote

You have asked for a free tool, I am not aware of one fro Ruby. If you change your mind and want to fork out some money, have a look at Visual Slickedit, far from free, but I suppose this is one case of "you get what you pay for".

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