What do you mean by Emacs not being enough?
Why Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream:
Don’t ever be ashamed to need an IDE or to ask for one. Of course, there are bad ways to use an IDE (e.g. you want code generated for you) but if you are interested in Ruby on Rails, chances are that you are a decent developer and you know how to leverage an IDE to make you more productive than when using emacs. Code completion or navigation debugging, refactoring, project management, source control integration etc… there are too many features to list that make you more productive if you use a tool that enables them.
This is 2006, not 1996. The programs we are writing and the problems we are solving every day are orders of magnitude harder than back then and our tools need to keep up with that need. Emacs is a fine text editor, but it’s no longer adequate for modern development.
Boy you are so wrong. I challenge any IDE master, try being half as
productive then a properly configured Emacs, in the hands of an knower.
Obsolete? You must be joking: Emacs is the reference point. Do check on
your beloved Eclipse, how do you save a file? Where do you think C-X C-S came from? Or the MS Studio/Jbuilder/whatever has key bindings of which editor?
What about code completion, who said that Editor MACroS cant do it? Class browser navigation its overrated, normally you just want to jump from function call to a body and back. A task perfectly performed by Emacs (or vim for that matter). Debugging? Use automated test suites, read your code instead of staring pointlessly at a debugger. But hey you can use gdb, rdb, jdb, or whatever else with Emacs trough the Grand Unified Debugger.
Refactoring? Perhaps the argument has some weight with a language like Java but definitely not for Ruby. Project management? Well if you like to complicate things there is EDE but I did not found need for it while working with RoR. Source control integration? Emacs has it period.
Comments
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What about a meaningfull ruby/rails with emacs howto?
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Point on! This part is somewhat lacking, some good links though:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowToUseEmacsWithRails
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?EmacsExtensions
http://blog.invisible.ch/index.php?p=000417 -
The problem perhaps is that Emacs is insanely powerful but it’s difficult to find concise and easy to read documentation on how to setup and use Emacs properly. There are tons of useful things out there, including IDE-like things like Semantic and ECB, but it takes patience to sort the wheat from the chaff and get it all setup properly.
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Maybe you can guide me to the englighten path.
I would like to use ruby-electric.el. I’m using emacsnt. My .emacs file contains only:
(require ‘ruby-electric)
When I load emacs, in the message buffer, I get:
Error in init file: Symbol’s function definition is void: define-minor-mode
I’m really not sure why. I can get ruby-mode working okay, at least I think I can. The syntax is highlighted.
Anything that I should try? -
Dan, do you have easy-mmode.el available in your loadpath? Emacs 22, 21 and commes with it packaged. I think Xemacs has (or atleast it had) it too.
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Yes I have that. If I call (require ‘easy-mmode) there’s no problem. But I’ve downloaded an uncompiled version off the internet so I’ll try that too later today :D
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Yeah even with the uncompiled it didn’t work :(
Any small code snippets I could try to discover where the problems actually occuring? -
Strange. Which version of Emacs are you using precisely? Ruby-electric.el is quite small, you can extract minor mode definition lines and play with them in the scratch buffer.
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GNU emacs 20.3.1 (i386-*-windows955.1)
So it seems I’ve downloaded an older version, maybe :D
Well that’s that mystery solved! Thanks I’ll try and find the latest version tonight! -
Ah problem solved – thankyou :D
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Amen!
BTW, I’ve been working on a collection of Emacs tools to help with writing Rails apps; you might be interested in it. It’s called Arorem.
http://dev.technomancy.us/phil/wiki/arorem
