The first beta of the ruby plugin is now available for IntelliJ 6.0+.  IntelliJ has proven to be a fabulous Java IDE and continues to be one of the top rated IDE’s on the market.  Adding support for Ruby (and future talk of Python) will go a long way in extending the IDE’s reach.  As the JetBrains team continues to enhance the ruby /
rails integration I’ll be posting my findings as to the pro’s and con’s of the integration. 

Best part of it is
that the ruby/rails support is being offered as a free plugin.. so no, you don’t need to
pay for an upgrade!

The beta releases notes offer screen shots and details on installation.  Unfortunately the plugin manager didn’t want to auto install for me so I had to download directly and copy to my /plugins directory.

Here’s the highlights (as pulled from release notes above):

Ruby Features:

  • Ruby module type
  • Ruby SDK support
  • Syntax highlighting
  • Grammatical checking on the fly (Ruby version 1.8.4)
  • Keywords autocompletion
  • Reformat code
  • Code style settings (on indent, show method separators)
  • Automatically statements completion (insert quotes, brackets, ‘end’ when needed)
  • TODO tasks support
  • Brace matching, folding
  • Ruby structure view, file structure popup (Ctrl+F12)
  • Support for ruby access modifiers
  • RDoc toolbar
  • Quick documentation lookup (selected text or word under cursor) by Ctrl+Q
  • Go to class, file, symbol (on project and SDK sources)
  • Ruby run configuration, quick script execution (Ctrl+Shift+F10)
  • One click Ruby plugin error submittion (create JIRA issue) 
  • String to symbol intention action

Rails Features:

  • Rails module type
  • Rails skeleton application generation
  • Rails generators execution from context menu
  • Rake tasks from context menu
  • Rails project view
  • Rails run configuration
  • Quick insert action in action controller

Gotchas (Release 0.1):
- When setting up a new ruby / rails module.. the location of the ruby SDK might not be that apparent on a linux platform.  Try setting to just “/usr”… as indicated by this bug report.

If your not an avid IntelliJ user, TextMate also offers very good ruby / rails support… however, as both do come with 30 day free evaluation licenses, I do suggest you play with both to see which product better fits your routine.

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