Text Editors and IDEs

You can use any text editor or IDE for working on Ruby on Rails projects. That said, many text editors and IDEs have plugins for adding extra functionality to make it easier to develop websites with Rails.

If you add editors, please add them in alphabetical order.

• RadRails

by Bare Bones Software - license costs $125

• BBEdit comes with language support for Ruby and Ruby in HTML
• There are some excellent tools by Corey Ehmke for Rails development in BBEdit at IdolHands.com
• Clippings sets for CSS and SASS (with Compass and Blueprint support) are available at ImaginaryWave

E is a commercial editor for Windows that can use TextMate bundles. It costs $34.95 from e-texteditor.com.

Emacs is a highly extensible, full-featured text editor. Emacs has been in development since the 1970's and continues today.

• EmacsWiki on Ruby on Rails
• Technomancy's Emacs Rails Starter Kit
• Peepcode Emacs Episode

• 3rdRail

• jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. The ruby plugin also handles rails.
• jEdit

• JetBrains RubyMine

• SapphireSteel's Ruby in Steel is a commercial plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio to develop Ruby and Rails apps.

• NetBeans wiki on Ruby on Rails
• Getting Started With Ruby and Rails in NetBeans 6.0

• Redcar - freeware
• GitHub Repository

by Macromates - license costs €39 ($57)

• TextMate comes with a Rails bundle pre-installed, although most people use Dr Nic's version (Github repository)

from vim.org, and, for Mac, MacVim

• rails.vim gives you syntax highlighting, improved navigation and invocation of script/* scripts
• Jamis Buck has two posts on his switch to using Vim for Rails projects: Coming home to Vim and Vim followup, both of which contain useful advice on plugins and .vimrc settings
• The Biodegradable Geek blog has an entry titled Using Vim as a Complete Ruby on Rails IDE