I have been looking for a good Rails IDE and think I have found one. I was using TextMate which has lots of great quick templating commands for Rails concepts for migrations, rhtml, and navigating between files and methods. However, I enjoy working with IDEs and tried some Eclipse based versions but felt that they were inadequate. My paying job at the time is mostly Java based and I use IntelliJ which makes my development more productive for that type of development.
I had not looked at NetBeans in some time because most Java developers were using Eclipse and that was fine for me at the time. So when I saw that NetBeans had a Rails related version of their IDE I was willing to give it another look. I can only say that for me this is a very nice IDE that has full functionality around the way I develop with Rails. Here are some of the features I find handy:
A simple IDE layout for components that is similar to IntelliJ. There are no unnecessary perspectives that Eclipse users have.
Support for auto-completion of methods with rdoc helpers.
Debugging capabilites that are simple to use.
Integration with version control repositories like Subversion. Tools to manage your Gems and Plugins from the Tools menu Easy navigation between Rails controllers and views as well as opening files via keystrokes. Decent refactoring built in Generators for creating Rails components. Menus to run Rake and Migration scripts Built in functionality to start a Rails console from your project It works great on my Mac and much more than I expected...Just to whet your appetite to get you more excited about this IDE here are a couple of screenshots from how I use this IDE:
Here is what it looks like when editing files with code completion and quick docs:
And here is a shot of what debugging looks like in NetBeans:
If you are working on a Mac make sure you look at this
link for setting up the fast debugger gem. You will also need to have XCode installed for compilation.
I think you will agree that this is the best IDE for Rails at this time.
