Every Flavour Beans

The JEdit editor today is among the most widely used programming editors. The editor has a very strong and committed developer & user community around it, which means an ever increasing number of features and its constantly improving stability. Today, it has enough number of features to compete with some of the best programming IDEs around. As is expected of a popular editor like JEdit, it has support for multiple programming languages(100+; eg: C++, Java, PHP, Ruby etc) and works on Windows, Mac OSX and GNU/Linux platforms. In this part of the “IDEs for Ruby Development” series, I discuss how to use JEdit editor to develop Ruby programs.
(Screenshots are taken in the GNU/Linux OS; same features are available on other platforms too.)

Download And Install JEdit Editor

Download the appropriate version of the JEdit package from the JEdit Download Page(the page also contains links to JEdit User Manual and JEdit Source Code).

JEdit depends on the Java Runtime Environment(JRE) to execute - make sure that Java is installed on your system before installing JEdit. Its straigh-forward to install JEdit on Windows and Mac OSX operating systems.

If you are a Gentoo user, the following command should download and install the latest version of JEdit available in the Gentoo portage tree:

On a Debian/Ubuntu system, add the following line to the ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’ file:

Now running the following two commands will install the JEdit package:

(Use ’sudo’ in front of all the commands if you are an Ubuntu user.)

You can use similar software package management tools to install JEdit on other GNU/Linux distributions(yum for Fedora, yast for SUSE etc) or install it using the RPM files. The application can be installed by building it from the source too.

Once the JEdit package is installed on your system, its time to install the plugin for the Ruby language.

Installing Ruby plugin for JEdit

Since the 0.8 version of the Ruby plugin for JEdit, it can be installed right from the JEdit editor. To install the plugin, start the JEdit editor, go to Plugins -> Plugin Manager menu, and click on the “Install” tab of the displayed dialog box. Wait for the dialog to fetch a list of all the plugins available for download and installation(you can view the list of plugins available for JEdit once it is downloaded and displayed in the dialog box, or you can also view a partial list of the plugins at the JEdit Quick Start page).

Once the table in the dialog box is filled with the available plugins, scroll down and search for the “RubyPlugin” entry and select it when found. Click “Install” to begin the download and installation process.

Develop Ruby Applications With JEdit

Once the plugin is installed, you are set to create Ruby applications in the JEdit editor environment. Some of the important feature that the Ruby plugin adds to the JEdit are code completion for methods, syntax error highlighting, automatic code indentation and integrated Ruby documentation. The plugin also adds the support to popup a window in which the user can browse the entire file structure of the Ruby program. The plugin is a work in progress and many more helpful features can be expected in the near future. RubyJedit.org website contains screenshots demonstrating some of the above mentioned features. Some more screenshots(related to integrated Ruby documentation in JEdit) follow.

JEdit is an excellent editor for editing programming code even without the Ruby plugin(Splitting and Docking Windows; Expanding and Collapsing Code Blocks); the plugin then adds sufficient Ruby specific functionality on top of it to make it one of the most feature-rich programming environments available today. For more ways to enhance the functionality of the JEdit editor, look at the other plugins available for installation in the Plugin Manager. The only downside of this editor is its sluggish behaviour especially when a lot of plugins are installed for it. Its load times become long and the general response afterwards won’t be too fast either. But with limited number of plugins, its an excellent choice to develop Ruby applications.

In the next and the last part of this “IDEs for Ruby Development” series, I will discuss using the ever popular Emacs and Vim editors to develop Ruby applications.