gears
within
gears

I’m at RailsConf this weekend, capping a six-months engagement delivering a couple of Rails apps written using NetBeans as our team’s primary Ruby editor. We ended up with it because the client requested that we do our all development work in Ubuntu 6.06, and because we couldn’t build a consensus around a more lightweight editor like Vim or jEdit. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on it for anyone’s who’s interested in switching.

Executive Summary

There’s a lot to love and a fair amount to hate, but it’s a solid alternative to TextMate if you’re not on a Mac.

Stuff I liked

• The basic refactoring support is surprisingly handy. Until I got back the ability to rename classes and methods I hadn’t realized I’d missed it. I’m told that Aptana can perform similar tricks, but it’s been a while since I’ve tried it out.
• Likewise, the ability to jump directly to a class definition is handy, although it isn’t perfect. (If you have more than one class of the same name defined but located in different files or scoped to different modules it can’t figure out which one, exactly, you’re referencing, which I suppose is understandable.)
• RSpec support! A must-have. And the ability to jump back and forth between test and class… most of the time.
• If you’re a Vi user, the jVi plugin is almost worth the price of switching purely on its own. It’s a truly excellent piece of software, with an enormous amount of tweakability and really support for Vi constructs, and one of my complaints with Vim itself has always been that it lacks good project/directory browsing support, and yes, I’ve tried the Project plugin… again and again and again.
• It knows to insert an “end” when I hit enter after a block or method definition. Just a stupid small thing, but I miss it now when I don’t have it.

Stuff I didn’t like

• It opens up a new output window each time you hit Shift-F6 to run a test, leading to a million open output windows after you’ve been using it for a while. This is an enormous pain in the ass, and it’s compounded by the problem of really poor tab management support in the section of the IDE that displays your previous test runs. This is my single biggest complaint.
• The “jump to file” functionality doesn’t insert automatic wildcards the way TextMate does. This drives me absolutely nuts and it’s something I miss desperately.
• Method autocomplete doesn’t work well and is far more trouble than it’s worth. I turn it off almost immediately.
• It does not, and here I am being charitable, have the most attractive design on the face of the planet. I realize that by stating this I am probably slagging the work of some diligent UI designer somewhere, and I realize that you have to work within the constraints of Swing themes across multiple platforms. But it doesn’t stack up well next to the clean design of TextMate, or the brand new, achingly sexy (YMMV) MacVim.

Lessons Learned

• Use a nightly build, and keep it fresh. It’s the only way to get support for stuff like RSpec. The nightly builds have been stable and make for happy funtimes.
• Spin up your dev server on the command line rather than using the builtin server runner. Maybe it’s just me, but using an IDE for this just doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

If you’ve spent any time working with Ruby in NetBeans I’d be curious to hear about it.