Does anyone have experience with Ruby in Steel?

Coming primarily from a .NET background, I am quite attached (for better or worse) to Visual Studio.

I'm going to school for software engineering now, though, and my first class is in XP (Extreme Programming) using Ruby on Rails. Mostly I've heard that when you're developing in Ruby, you tend to skip the whole IDE altogether; and I'm totally open to that possibility. There are IDEs out there, though, and so it seems like there must be at least some folks wh开发者_开发百科o still find that using one is worthwhile.

Since I am so familiar with VS, I was just wondering if anybody out there has used Ruby In Steel. From the website, it certainly looks nice. I have literally no idea how useful or appropriate it is for general RoR development, though, which is why I thought I'd throw this question out there.

Have you used Ruby In Steel? What are your impressions of it? How does it stack up against other well-known IDEs such as Netbeans? And is it even worthwhile to use an IDE for RoR development, or is a good text editor preferable?

Short answer

Skip the IDE and use Vim (or your favorite, simple, text editor)

Long answer

I'm a C# developer and have used Visual Studio as an IDE since I started programming. I love Visual Studio and always laughed at those people who didn't use an IDE. I just didn't get it. So when I started learning Ruby on Rails, the first thing I did was look for the best IDE available. I tried NetBeans, RubyMine, Aptana, and every text editor I could find (not Ruby in Steel, however, b/c I didn't want to pay for it).

I settled on NetBeans finally and thought it was pretty good. But it takes 30-60 seconds to load. And you soon find out that intellisense with ruby doesn't really work (and even if it did, the rails api's don't really make sense with intellisense anyway). What happened was that I found myself using Notepad++ to make quick edits to my files.

But then slowly I started using Notepad++ more often and would need to have my server running, so I opened up the console to run the server (instead of my ide). Then I needed a controller generated, but it was faster to look up the command line syntax to generate the controller than it was to load my IDE. That's when I started to realize that I didn't really need, or even want, and IDE for rails development, I was perfectly happy with Notepad++. Those no-IDE guys weren't so crazy after all.

So I started looked at all of the text editors I could find and ran across Vim (you know, that crappy old text editor that those grumpy old programmers used to use before I was born). Vim, with some rails plugins, is all I use now for rails development. It was hard to convince my Visual Studio loving self that a console based text editor would actually make me more productive than an full IDE, but once I gave it a chance, I was really impressed.

Now, learning Vim and Rails and Ruby at the same time is a large undertaking, but I would at least recommend you learn the rails command line and use your favorite text editor, instead of a fat, slow, $200 IDE.

I looked at the original release - it was nicely done but the trial period expired and it hadn't become essential to my development existence. To date, no IDE has, although I do keep an up-to-date install of NetBeans for the occasional foray into Rails framework debugging (that's usually bugs in my understanding rather than bugs in Rails, btw).

While the IDEs (and I note that Ruby In Steel 2.0 was just announced in early Nov 2010) are all smart, I have tended to find that applying TDD mostly removes the need for IDE-based step-through style debugging.

Assuming they continue the trial program as before, you should be able to spend 60 days with RIS 2.0 before you have to commit any money. That ought to be enough to establish whether or not it can be worth buying.

I was really interested in Ruby in Steel but I didn't find the trial very useful. This was some time ago and it has more features now. Before you plonk $200 for this, I'd definitely give Aptana RadRails a try as a free IDE, or look at e-TextEditor which is what I use now. It has really good bundles for rails development and is also a great general purpose editor; although it does not have an integrated debugger I've found that I am just as effective without it using the rails console.