I recently moved from Windows to a Linux development environment and needed to find good text editor – particularly one that was (or could be made) friends with Ruby. Ideally this editor would be cross platform because, on occasion I do have to load up Windows and if possible I wanted to avoid having a different editor for each environment.
On Windows I was using E – but that does not run on Linux and I had a couple of gripes with it (slow loading of large files and overaggressive code completion). I gave Vim/gVim a shot but I didn’t enjoy text-editing in a console and gVim is ugly (yes, I do believe attractiveness is important). I was suspicious of the IDE possibilities out there but I did give a number of them (RadRails, RDE, Eclipse, etc) a quick shot. Suffice to say they all suffered from one or more of the following: being too bloated, waving too many wands and possessing play buttons (I feel a rant coming on… stifle!).
Enter jEdit. It is a very functional, customizable, extensible, java based editor and it looks pretty good to boot. So a couple weeks ago I set it up on both my Windows and Linux installs and so far so good – it has what I want and does not suffer from the gripes I had with E. One of my favourite features so far (keep in mind its only been a couple weeks) is it’s “Hyper Search” which is a bit like a built in ack.
Currently, I’m using the following plugins (geared towards ruby/web development):
- Editor Scheme (for pre-fabricated syntax highlighting schemes)
- RubyPlugin
- Console
- Templates
One thing I did have to do in order to get Ruby ERB files to be highlighted properly was to update jEdit’s “modes” catalog file. On my Windows install this was located in C:\Program Files\jEdit\Modes and on Linux it was located in /usr/share/jEdit/modes. My file already contained a reference to an ‘rhtml’ mode so I just updated it – here is the whole mode block:
<MODE NAME="erb" FILE="erb.xml"
FILE_NAME_GLOB="*.{.html.erb,rhtml}" />
If you use that you’ll also need to rename the file rhtml.xml to erb.xml (it will be in the same directory as the catalog file).
As I said I’ve only been using jEdit for a couple of weeks but thus far I do not have anything negative to report. If that changes I’ll update this post. In the meantime, if anyone has any comments about jEdit or other options I might have overlooked please let me (and us) know.