Best IDE for Ruby on Rails That You Need to Know

Well, let’s start by understanding what exactly IDE is and what is its purpose? This blog will list out some of the best IDE’s for ruby on rails. As we all know, ruby on rails is an open-source framework and thousands of applications are built using it. Now it’s time to work fast with a smart editor and to produce high-quality code efficiently. Thanks to first-class support as we can take advantage of the language-specific aware syntax & error highlighting, quick documentation, code completion and code formatting.

What is IDE?

The integrated development environment is a software application that provides facilities to developers and programmers for software development. An IDE is divided into three parts (a) source code editor (b) build automation (c) debugger. There are many modern IDE’s have a class browser, an object browser, a class hierarchy diagram for an object-oriented software development approach. For various programming languages such as Java, Python, C, C++ there are several IDE’s available.

Use of IDE-

• Without worrying about the project now, a programmer can quickly navigate to a type.

• IDE allows programmers to easily navigate to other members with the help of hyperlinks.

• Helps in auto-generation of code by using previous codes.

• Organizes various imports by the programmer and adds some appropriate imports.

• Makes programmer work easy, by keeping the view of files, errors or warnings, and source code on the same screen.

• It makes the running of the unit test easy.

• It also helps the programmer to directly navigate to the compile-time error.

Being a developer you will spend a lot of time in the editor and thus it is important to choose an editor that is comfortable and productive.

Things to consider before choosing ruby on rails IDE

Well, no need to stress over this decision, just pick the right one, give it a try and check how it feels. There is a scope to change editor in the future.

• Look for built-in features for improved productivity (features such as code snippets, autocomplete, clean design)

• To check if the editor is open-source.

• To make things easier, what ruby related plugins are available on a chosen editor.

Let’s get started with the best IDE for ruby on rails

• RubyMine

  

  It is a closed source code editor of JetBrains. RubyMine IDE facilitates programmer with a ruby code editor which is aware of a dynamic language, delivers smart coding assistance, intelligent code refactoring and code analysis capabilities. In terms of features, it is one of the most complete IDE, but it is not free.

  The current version available in RubyMine is RubyMine2019.3 this adds better code insight, improves the debugger and incorporates many platform improvements.

  Pros of RubyMine-

  • Code refactoring.
  • Smart auto-completion.
  • Built-in support for common gems.

Cons of RubyMine-

• Closed source.
• For UI designs and performance, it can feel heavy.

• Sublime text

  

  It is one of the most powerful cross-platform code editor available for programmers. Though it is an editor, with available plugins it can be used as a fully-featured IDE. In one place it is the combination of quality and simplicity of sublime and possesses powers of python. For ruby programming, there are many plugins available that can transform the text into a full-featured sublime IDE.

Pros of sublime text –

• Powerful API and package ecosystem.
• Customize anything.
• Instant project switch

CON’s of Sublime text-

• The community is not very active.
• Vintage mode clipboard interaction.

• VS Code editor-

  

  Many Rubyists are using visual studio for ruby development. You just need to install a vscode-ruby extension that will provide debugging support and ruby language. It uses rubocop for formatting, rcodetools for autocompletion, Rspec and cucumber for debugging and unit testing. VSCode is free as it is an open-source code editor from Microsoft.

  Pros of VSCode editor-

  • Powerful multi-language IDE.
  • Intellisense
  • Git integration.

Cons of VSCode editor-

• Lacks full features of IDE.
• Longer launch time.

• Atom

  

  It is also an open-source and highly configurable code editor from GitHub. Including ruby, it supports many programming languages. It is free to use for commercial and personal development. It has fast grown in popularity and keeps editor updated with new features. Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora22+, Mac, and Red Hat Linux support atom.

  Pros of Atom –

  • Git integration.
  • Timesaving as it supports code snippets.
  • Available with plugins.

Cons of Atom –

• Slow while opening big files.
• Because of non-core package misbehaving, atom crashes.

Conclusion

Thousand of IDE are available in the market. As per your project, you can choose the best IDE. The IDE we mentioned above are very popular and easily accessible to coders and developers. Enhance your programming skills by using these powerful ROR IDE’s. Most of them are free to use. From the above points, we hope you have learned about a few IDEs to make your work easier and productive. Let us know in the comment section which one you will pick?

Happy reading!