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