A Ruby IDE

I’ve always wanted to build an IDE. At the same time, Ruby, probably my favorite language at the moment, seems to be strangely missing a decent one even after being around for a few years. Charles got me all excited about writing one for it, and we’re currently starting some work on one.

Our vision is to eventually build an IntelliJ style IDE with tons of refactoring support on top of Parrot AST’s. This means that it in theory, with a few tweaks, it should support any language which can run on top of the Parrot VM. This includes ruby, python, perl6 and a ton of others. Pretty cool concept, yeah?

That said, I don’t know how far we’ll get, and I don’t know how long or how much work it will be. My personal shortterm goal is to write something that is better for editting ruby than IntelliJ (that’s right, I use IntelliJ to edit ruby code, which is sad).

We’re still evaluating packages and stuff, but right now we aren’t thinking of building it on top of !FreeRide, but instead building it on directly on top of wxWidgets and their Scintilla port. That way we get native widgets, not to mention Cocoa support for my mac :). We’ll write it in Ruby, but I smell a lot of C++ code in my immediate future as well… Oh well.

I’ll keep blogging our progress.

Tags: ,

One Response to “A Ruby IDE”

  1. Rob Says:

    I’m developing a Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit that contains Intellij style features. Check it out at:

    http://www.jedit.org/ruby/

Leave a Reply