I’ve previously griped about the lack of a good IDE for Ruby on Rails and despite trying out TextMate for a month I just wasn’t happy enough with it – I’m still spending far too much time navigating files and not enough time coding.  There’s a lot of talk about just using VIM and being happy with that (example) but that VIM just doesn’t have a good enough interface for selecting which file to edit and navigating the file system, let alone for quickly scanning files to find the section I want.

Fortunately, this evening I went out Googling for a better solution and found Ruby Development Tools – a set of Ruby plugins for Eclipse.  It’s perfect for me (and probably most other Java to Ruby converts) - an editing interface that I’m intimately familiar with, simple navigation of the file hierarchy and as a bonus, support for the Eclipse Outline view to jump to a specific method etc and Test::Unit support (not that I actually know how to use Test::Unit yet but this might prompt to actually do the right thing and start writing tests).

It’s still very much beta software but is quite usable as is and hopefully more of the Eclipse feature set will make it in soon.