Netbeans Intellisense for Rails

Question

Has anybody figured out a way to make the Netbeans intellisense for ruby and rails better? It either has too many options in the list (which I understand is a problem since it is a dynamic language). Or it has no options in the list, as if it is not dynamic enough to find everything.

Are there any hacks to make it better, or is this just something that needs to be improved within the Netbeans source code? I'm currently using 6.8.

Please spare me the posts about how I don't really need to use intellisense, and I should use vim or emacs. I'm sure the vim programmers are 10 times more productive than me with all their cool shortcuts, but I have no desire to learn these tools.

Joesphjoete

I'm with you, irishfury; code completion/intellisense can provide huge productivity gains. I'm also an avid Rails on NetBeans developer, but I sometimes find it's attempt to do code completion for Rails to be more trouble than it is worth. I suspect the problem is that a type Ruby object just has so many methods that you'd have to specifically make a list of things that you don't want to see and exclude them. Don't know enough about NB's architecture to know if that'd be feasible, but it'd make the feature much more useful. – Evin

You'd also struggle to keep up with the very rapid pace at which Rails changes. – Evin

Link to discussion on Netbeans forum. Maybe it will be improved soon. They need this to be competitive with RubyMine. forums.netbeans.org/topic23012.html – Joesphjoete

It's good to know that others are thinking about as well. – Evin

Not really an answer but I find moving the cursor as far right as possible in the method name you're interested in helps a lot. Guess you know hitting control space brings up/refreshes the list too. This is about as much as I use. Would be great if this was improved. – Bedside

I've been trying Redmine on Linux for a few days. It definitely has better intellisense, and better support for RSpec and Cucumber tests. But Redmine is kind of kludgy, a bigger memory hog, and a little ugly compared to NetBeans. NetBeans could take the lead with some improvements in intellisense, shortcut keys to run rake tasks, and integrated cucumber tests. – Joesphjoete

Answer 1

if you click on options, in tools and select options. Then go to miscellaneous tab, and select ruby.

enable extended type interface (may be slow) check on for methods.

I tried doing this it is giving me better intellisense with methods like p, and protected methods as well.

I am using netbeans 6.8 and I suppose this would offer you better intellisense.

Birthroot

Answer 2

It has to be improved by the Netbeans team. There's nothing you can really do to help it.

[edit: oh, and you can have code completion with Vim, so .. You should use Vim! :p]

Quantifier

Answer 3

There's been improvements in 6.8, but it's still far from perfect, and you mentionned you are already using 6.8.

You might want to try RadRails - can't tell you if their code completion is better though (I'm a NetBeans user), but I seem to recall reading it was.

Proposition

Answer 4

I'm with you on intellisense. If you're on a Mac, you might try Coda from Panic. It has better intellisense than either RadRails or Netbeans for Ruby/Rails IMHO.

Dube

Answer 5

Sadly you just have to wait. I read that Oracle is now focusing NB on scripting languages, and there were plans afoot to add most of what you are talking about to 6.9. You can check out the nightly builds here: http://bits.netbeans.org/download/trunk/nightly/latest/ They've already hit milestone 1.

Flier

I'm now running 6.9M1. It's very stable, but I have not noticed any significant changes with regards to Ruby or Rails. I hope you are right about Oracle. There is an opportunity in the Linux and Windows marketplace for them. None of the Ruby on Rails IDE's are superb. Of course, I'm still trying to figure out if Oracle is going to continue supporting NetBeans. I hope so. I think it is the best open-source IDE in market. – Joesphjoete

Answer 6

I haven't gotten to play with Ruby and Ruby on Rails in NetBeans 6.9, but one of the features touted by the Release Notes was improved code completion in dynamic languages (Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and Python). You might want to consider upgrading (if you haven't already) and checking it out.

Irradiate