I started writing some Ruby code this past weekend for a new project that I’m involved in. Rather than download an IDE mentioned in my previous article, I Want My IDE, I decided to use the gedit text editor that comes bundled with Ubuntu Linux.

Attempting to capture the experience Mac users get from using TextMate, I installed the Class Browser, File Browser Pane, Project Manager, Snap open, and Snippets plugins from live.gnome.org. I also enabled line numbers, current line highlighting, and bracket matching. It’s not quite TextMate, but it’s not a bad choice either.

I had initially stated that my top two needs of an IDE were Subversion (SVN) integration and code completion. I didn’t have either of these with gedit, but I didn’t find myself missing them either. I’ve grown accustomed to using SVN from the command-line and ruby-doc.org didn’t slow me down too much while looking up class definitions.

Overall I’m quite pleased, but I have to admit that installing gedit plugins was a bit tricky and I never did get my fonts to look like those found in the TextMate-like Gedit tutorial.