NetBeans 6 Ruby Support Even Better Than Expected

See, here's the deal. I'm not a very advanced IDE user. I used Eclipse for years and JDE before that, and I wouldn't ever have considered myself a "pro" with either. I learned what I needed to get the job done and not a whole lot else. Beyond that I never knew some of the coolest features, and was never so good at convincing people to make a switch. This actually has helped my migration to NetBeans, since it basically does all the things I was used to in Eclipse. But it has been problematic when I try to convey how cool the new NetBeans Ruby support really is.

It's super cool. It does things I've not seen any other IDE or editor do.

However, it's best not to take my advice, and Roumen Strobl has recorded two seriously excellent demonstrations of Rails and Ruby support in NetBeans. They make the sale way better than I could (though I now have many good ideas for how to sell it better in the future).

If you have any interest in Ruby editors or IDEs, you should take the time and watch these, especially the Ruby support.

Two Demos: JRuby on Rails and Advanced Ruby Editing in NetBeans!

NetBeans + Ruby = Awesome

Tor Norbye is a programming machine on par with the legendary Ola of Bini. He's the one-man force working on NetBeans Ruby support, and his progress has been epic. Here's his latest screenshot and a short blurb about it:

NetBeans + Ruby = True

In just over two months' time, Tor seems to be (in my opinion) on the verge of eclipsing every other Ruby editor/IDE out there. I've been using development builds of his stuff and it's really superb. A few features I've missed before that are now rapidly maturing in NB+RB:

• Highlight usages: not genius, but smarter than dumb-as-a-post right now; great for local and block vars, getting smarter for methods
• Clickable methods and variables: limited to method-scope for variables or file-scope for methods, but coming along very quickly...and even those limited scopes are way better than nothing at all. I don't know how many times I've wanted to Ctrl-Click a method in some giant Ruby file and go straight to the method def. Awe-some.
• Inline refactoring: I've demoed this a couple times, but for local and block vars you can do inline renaming...essentially renaming all instances of the variable at the same time. It's really nice, looks cool, and represents the tip of the iceberg for refactoring capabilities.

There's plenty of other stuff that's cool, like the Navigator view of a file (shows classes, modules, methods, of currently-selected file), AST view (great for us Ruby language hackers that like to see the actual structure of things), and more.

Things are definitely shaping up nice for next-generation Ruby IDEs.

Eclipse to NetBeans: Quick Outline Module

I'm trying to be 100% NetBeans these days, and I'll be documenting tips and tricks as I learn them. Hopefully others going through the same exercise will find these tips and they'll help make the transition smoother.

Why am I making this move, you ask? Well, of course there's the whole fact that I work for Sun, but that's not the primary motivation; if a tool doesn't accomplish what I want, I'm not going to use it. But NetBeans has made amazing strides this past year. It's now not only better-looking and faster than Eclipse, it also includes includes a much, much larger set of functionality in the base download. And that download? 30-60MB smaller than Eclipse 3.2. That's pretty amazing.

Anyway, one feature I sorely missed was the "Quick Outline" in Eclipse, where Command-O (or Ctrl-O) brings up a fast search for members of the current class. It's pretty darn useful, and I really, really missed it.

However, Sandip Chitale to the rescue. He's created a "Java File Structure" module, which exactly duplicates the Quick Outline functionality. Thank goodness!

Read Sandip's post to install the NetBeans Quick Outline module (Java File Structure) and try it for yourself. He's also got a quick Java class hierarchy module that looks great, but it's not something I use very often. Perhaps I will use it more now.

Oh, and you can find information about the modules in Help after they're installed, but to save you some confusion: The shortcut for File Structure is initially Cmd-Shift-S (Ctrl-Shift-S) and for Hierarchy is Cmd-Shift-H (Ctrl-Shift-H).

One more NetBeans annoyance down the drain!