Tips and tricks for using emacs to develop a ruby on rails app

Question

What are the best modes, configuration settings, or anything that makes developing a ruby on rails app in emacs better.

Answer 1

You should try all the RoR and settle on the one you like best.

First you should check out Marshall Vandegrift's excellent screencast using ECB, ruby-mode, emacs-rails, and some other stuff. It gives you a good feel for how cool writing RoR on Emacs can be.

In short here are some of the modes you should try:

• Rinari - A simple framework for getting around your code, running tests, and managing consoles, web-servers, etc. It's minimalistic and revolves around a series of key-bindings.
• Emacs-rails - the grandfather of Emacs RoR modes. It hasn't been updated in a while, and in fact the primary homepage no longer exists. But it's quite powerful and lets you do almost everything.
• Emacs-rails-reloaded - This is a re-design of the original emacs-rails, I believe by the same guy. It uses the the great anything mode to help you find things and get around. I am using this AND rinari currently.

Here are some other modes that are useful:

• ECB - the Emacs Code Browser. Use it for project management, and getting around your code.
• Yasnippet - provides all kinds of useful snippets, automatically inserted with the TAB key.
• Nxhtml - For editing rhtml, erb, etc.

More modes you might try:

• Ri - for viewing ri documentation inline.
• Flymake-ruby - on the fly syntax checking.
• Ri - for viewing ri documentation

Oh and of course you need ruby-mode, which comes with the ruby source, and is maintained by Matz himself.

Hope this helps

Answer 2

Another mode that I find useful that has not been mentioned is web-mode. It is useful for writing views, and handles .html.erb files very well. It features syntax highlighting and tag completion, among other things. You can find it at here.

Answer 3

Since I am new to rails (and emacs), I don't want to use rinari right away. I find that if a tool does too much magic for me I don't learn the details as quickly as I would like. I think I will use it eventually. For now, however, I set up a bunch of shells that I spawn in emacs for RAILS 3 and just switch between them to do my work. I prefix them with tmr so that I can easily find them.

   (defun tmr-spork-shell ()
      "Invoke spork shell" ; Spork - love that name
      (interactive)
      (pop-to-buffer (get-buffer-create (generate-new-buffer-name "spork")))
      (shell (current-buffer))
      (process-send-string nil "cd .\n"); makes sure rvm variables set with .rvmrc
      (process-send-string nil "spork\n"))

    (defun tmr-devlog-shell ()
      "Tail the development log, shell"
      (interactive)
      (pop-to-buffer (get-buffer-create (generate-new-buffer-name "devlog")))
      (shell (current-buffer))
      (process-send-string nil "cd .\n"); makes sure rvm variables set with .rvmrc
      (process-send-string nil "tail -f log/development.log\n"))

    (defun tmr-testlog-shell ()
      "Tail the test log, shell"
      (interactive)
      (pop-to-buffer (get-buffer-create (generate-new-buffer-name "testlog")))
      (shell (current-buffer))
      (process-send-string nil "cd .\n"); makes sure rvm variables set with .rvmrc
      (process-send-string nil "tail -f log/test.log\n"))

    (defun tmr-server-shell ()
      "Invoke rails ui server shell"
      (interactive)
      (pop-to-buffer (get-buffer-create (generate-new-buffer-name "server")))
      (shell (current-buffer))
      (process-send-string nil "cd .\n"); makes sure rvm variables set with .rvmrc
      (process-send-string nil "rails s\n"))

    (defun tmr-db-shell ()
      "Invoke rails dbconsole shell"
      (interactive)
      (pop-to-buffer (get-buffer-create (generate-new-buffer-name "dbconsole")))
      (shell (current-buffer))
      (process-send-string nil "cd .\n"); makes sure rvm variables set with .rvmrc
      (process-send-string nil "rails dbconsole\n"))

    (defun tmr-console-shell ()
      "Invoke rails console shell"
      (interactive)
      (pop-to-buffer (get-buffer-create (generate-new-buffer-name "console")))
      (shell (current-buffer))
      (process-send-string nil "cd .\n"); makes sure rvm variables set with .rvmrc
      (process-send-string nil "rails console\n"))

    ; I like to run all my tests in the same shell
    (defun tmr-rspec-shell ()
      "Invoke rspec shell"
      (interactive)
      (pop-to-buffer (get-buffer-create (generate-new-buffer-name "rspec")))
      (shell (current-buffer))
      (process-send-string nil "cd .\n"); makes sure rvm variables set with .rvmrc
      (process-send-string nil "rspec spec\n")) ; This is debatable, since spork wont be up yet

    ; The shell where I do most of my work
    (defun tmr-shell ()
      "Invoke plain old shell"
      (interactive)
      (pop-to-buffer (get-buffer-create (generate-new-buffer-name "sh")))
      (shell (current-buffer))
      (process-send-string nil "cd .\n")); makes sure rvm variables set with .rvmrc

    ; My everyday ide
    (defun tmr-ide-lite ()
      "Spawn several shells for a mini Rails IDE"
      (interactive)
      (progn (tmr-spork-shell)
             (tmr-shell)
             (tmr-server-shell)
             (tmr-rspec-shell)))

    ; When I am doing a big debug session
    (defun tmr-ide-full ()
      "Spawn several shells for a full Rails IDE"
      (interactive)
      (progn (tmr-spork-shell)
             (tmr-shell)
             (tmr-server-shell)
             (tmr-console-shell)
             (tmr-db-shell)
             (tmr-devlog-shell)
             (tmr-testlog-shell)
             (tmr-rspec-shell)))

Answer 4

rspec-mode (run single or multiple specs easily)

js2-mode (JavaScript syntax highlighting)

ido (find files/buffers in your project super quickly)