Ruby IDEs : Whose code completion works?

I’ve been trying to get my hands on a good ruby editor for a while and somehow every time I take a look at the one’s that exist, I am not at all impressed. These are a few of the editors that I have taken a look at and my impressions of them. As a beginner to Ruby, my only requirements initially are that I have syntax highlighting, code completion and it should just work without me having to do a whole lot. I am yet to test it them out with Rails (although I’m assuming that if they work good with ruby, they will work good with Rails)

1. SciTE - This comes installed by default if you are a windows user using the Ruby ‘One click installer’ available here. Of the 3 editors I looked at, this has the fewest features. One thing that is good about this though is that it is extremely quick to load. Unfortunately it lacks code completion which is a major requirement of mine. The reason why I believe code completion is useful while learning a language is you can actually look through all the methods for the various built-in objects rather than having to go back to the documentation each time. Consider this your bare bones editor with syntax highlighting. I wasn’t very happy with the indentation support as well, for example, it indents it when you start a function, but typing in ‘end’ does not reset the indentation. Its a small annoyance but an annoyance no less.

2. Aptana - I thought that this would be the most promising editor now that they have taken up the RadRails project as well and are integrating it into their existing system. Aptana is based off of Eclipse and provides a well rounded development environment. As of this writing however, Aptana’s code completion for ruby is broken (and has been for quite a while). All the other features seem to work well, syntax highlighting, debug support, etc. but it throws a Null Pointer Exception when you try to do a ctrl-space for code completion.

3. Netbeans - Of all the editors, I found this the simplest to install and start using right out of the box (with the exception of changing one setting, that is if you want to use the native ruby compiler). Other than that I had no hiccups in getting up to speed with the Netbeans editor and I would recommend it to anyone starting out with Ruby. Netbeans themselves have a nice site to show you how to get going with it.

A more in dept review of some editors is available here, and it very nicely outlines the advantages of Netbeans