Ruby code completion in Emacs, Intellisense-style?

March 7, 2007 4:09 PM

Rcodetools, possibly in conjunction with Icicles, seems like it should be the bee's knees for doing Ruby code completion in Emacs. I need help getting it to actually work.

Does anyone have this working properly? Could you talk me through it in baby steps? The existing documentation seems rather sparse, and assumes you're already quite proficient in Emacs lisp.

I did manage at one point to get as far as actually having rcodetools do some completion, but it behaves weirdly. For example, if I'm in an empty buffer and type 42. and execute rct-complete-symbol, it happily obliges and gives me all the methods available to an Integer. But suppose instead I type

def foo
   42.
end

and, with point after 42., execute rct-complete-symbol, then it tells me no completions are found. What gives?

Anyway - any help greatly appreciated. I greatly miss IntelliSense from Ruby in Visual Studio now that I'm on a Mac full time, and I'm really hoping emacs can do at least some of what VS does.

posted by dmd to computers & internet (2 comments total)

I am a VI guy myself, but have you tried the emacs IRC channels? On the mac, I use Colloquyto hop on irc, and on the freenode network, there is an emacs channel that I'm sure can help you out.
posted by cschneid at 9:05 PM on March 7, 2007

I think I'm going to end up using NetBeans. I don't think rcodetools comes anywhere near approaching this kind of utility.
posted by dmd at 7:40 AM on March 8, 2007