Ruby on Rails editors

I've been trying out several editors for doing Ruby on Rails (RoR) websites. For a while now I've been using a standard editor, Crimson Editor, which has been mostly ok but it's pretty basic (it's just a text editor afterall). It does syntax highlighting, but that's about it really. As the editor is some two years old it doesn't include things like code templates (inserting snippets of code from a keyword).

The first editor I tried was Project RIDE-ME. It was mostly ok, with it being memory friendly and a clean layout, but the snippets were annoying. Instead of it replacing the snippet keyword with the snippet text it would put the snippet text at the beginning of the line. Generally I was three tabs deep when trying to add a snippet, but after hitting the tab key it'd put the snippet at the beginning of the line (including multiline snippets), forcing me to tab the lines back to where I wanted them to go in the first place. Some might say that it's only a minor problem, and will probably be fixed in a later version, but it's a very annoying problem when I was trying to use the snippets a lot. Also, the website doesn't show what the latest version is to download, so I wouldn't know if I was getting an updated version or the same as what I had until I actually installed it.

The next editor I tried was RoRED. This is a new editor, and it shows really. The options window only has two tabs; one for handling tab characters in the code, the other for code snippets. The code snippet handling is much better in RoRED than Project RIDE-ME, although you have to hit shift+space to expand the snippet keyword instead of the tab key like Project RIDE-ME. The only problem with the snippets, which I reported to the developer, is that the snippets use the pipe character "|" to show where the cursor should be placed when the snippet is inserted. In Ruby the pipe character is also used for things like blocks, so it messes up if the cursor should be placed after a block start, but the snippet manager will place the cursor at the opening pipe of the block. The developer replied back to me and said that the cursor indicator has now been changed so it shouldn't be a problem in the future. The only real problem I have with RoRED is that I am able to crash it pretty much every time I use it. The crash only happens when I close the program so I'm at least able to get all my work done!

I've now moved on to trying out RadRails. I had looked at it several months ago but I never really paid much attention to it. It's a pretty powerful editor, based on Eclipse, which has some nice snippet handling (much better than any other editor I've used). The only downside for me at the moment (after only a small amount of testing) is that it's based off of Eclipse and thus Java, which is a huge memory hog. I don't know if it can be passed some Java options for controlling things like memory and heap size, but right now it's pretty slow and takes a while redrawing the controls when something as simple as the start bar appears over the top of it.

I've imported my most recent RoR project into RadRails and I'll play with it some more to see how things go. I can probably put up with it being slow though (unless I can configure it, that is) as the snippet stuff, as well as the other features (not forgetting those!), mean that it's must better than the other editors. I'll still checkout RoRED every now and then as it was a decent enough editor, but nothing like RadRails.