NetBeans looks great. Perhaps you can help me with something, though. Every time I try to evaluate one of these spiffy, does-everything-but-brush-your-teeth IDEs I go through the following process: (1) search for half an hour to find exactly the right thing to download; (2) download, install, and run; (3) now what???

In other words, I've found the documentation for fancy features to be rich, but instructions for just getting started are piss poor. Particularly critical is the lack of docs for step 3---how do I start or import a Rails project into the IDE? I've tried Eclipse, Aptana, and NetBeans, and given up in despair each time. I eventually figured it out for RadRails under Linux, but that was only after much effort. (I've since switched to Mac/TextMate.)

Any help with the three steps above would be much appreciated. If anyone can post a nice step-by-step guide to getting started, I might even switch to NetBeans!

Give me a second while i get undrunk

yeah its hard if you are not familiar with the IDE at hand. Its not unlike say, setting up SLIME for CL when you are gasp not an emacs user ;)

Heh. I did set up SLIME for CL (in XEmacs), after like 8 attempts. I forget how I eventually got it to work, but IIRC I cycled through several CL implementations before cracking it. (SBCL didn't, alas, work with SLIME out of the box.)

This brings up some advice for Arc adoption, in case it hasn't yet been addressed: don't assume people will know (or will be willing to learn) Emacs. And don't count on NetBeans support. :-)

you got it. Powerful tools require a large investment of your time. I was never an emacs user but I am slowly changing that, as it seems to still be relevant and you can get it anywhere.

looks like i have to get back at you tomorrow

I've been using the most recent stable dev releases for several months now and love them.

http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/job/ruby/

Also, the devs are incredibly quick to respond to bugs if you run in to a problem.

i posted something on this a couple hours ago... this is the only way anyone should work on RoR

Yes, I saw you posted the screencast: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47886

I'm going to watch that later and then give it a trial run. Did you try it already?

yup... setting up debugging is a bitch though

Cool. I wish the editor could be modified to act like Vim. I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.

I think you can use vim as the default editor if you want

http://externaleditor.netbeans.org/

Well, I meant full vim integration. The code completion looks wonderful. Vim already provides syntax coloring and RoR itself provides svn integration (append -c to script/generate or script/destroy commands).

The only reason I can see to use Netbeans is the great code completion and auto-documentation. (Those are huge reasons, though.)

Edit: Hmm.. "We have been working closely with the owner of Vim and he has incorporated our netbeans integration code into a vim 6.1 patch (patch number 366). Currently these sources are not available in a vim release."

So I'm confused as to whether it does or it doesn't fully integrate with Vim. I'll have to try it after work..

There is a plugin for vi keyboard commands.

I really don't want to know the etymology of that one.

Is Netbeans free?

Yes. GPL.