General
At last, Ruby auto-completion!
Komodo, an IDE I looked at a couple of years ago for PHP before settling on Zend Studio, recently hit version 3.5 and introduced support for Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
I'm checking out the 21-day trial at the moment and it seems pretty cool so far, so if it continues to impress over the next week or two I might go for a personal licence and start using it at home instead of RadRails (at least until RadRails can introduce a few key features like window splitting and code auto-completion).
Komodo still isn't the perfect Rails IDE for me, but it looks like it could be the best so far. A few things that could make it near-enough perfect (for me at least - others will have different requirements):
- Whole-project class/method/variable mapping The Code pane on the left is useful, but as with every IDE I've used bar the excellent Zend, it only lists code from files you actually have open to edit. Zend maps all the code in your project so that you can quickly jump to a class, variable declaration or function anywhere in your app without having to remember which file to open first.
- Unlimited window splitting/cloning Komodo lets you split the window once, which is better than RadRails' none, but again Zend offers no limit. jEdit actually does this even better by allowing more control over where the splits occur, making it easier to get a setup that fits your needs.
- More Rails integration This is the one area RadRails trumps all - the ability to start/stop WEBrick servers and run generators from within the IDE. At the moment in Komodo I need a command prompt open to run the WEBrick server while coding to test locally and when I run a scaffold or similar generator I then have to tell Komodo to re-import the new files as it doesn't notice them appearing
- I had more but I've been doing other things while writing this and I've forgotten them. Guess they'll have to wait for another post :)