September 10, 2018

Using Vim and rails

As of early 2018, I have abandonded Rails and never intend to have anything to do with it again. Rails has been the source of more misery and suffering than any software system I have ever been involved with. It looked so good going in though, and is strongly hyped.

I hate rails. One of many reasons is that Rails forces you to scatter source files in a half dozen directories and then jump around making changes in all of them. Something to make this insane process less insane is the goal of many rails users.
If you are foolish enough to have anything to do with rails, there are some Vim plugins that you can look at:

Plugins to aid rails development

These are some old notes from before I gave up on Rails entirely. Maybe they will be helpful to someone.

Rails development has always been a huge pain the ass due to the need to jump around between model, controller, and view directories. I found myself doing java development aided by eclipse and it handles this kind of thing very nicely with a project navigator bar on the left side of the window (in conjunction with the vim plugin for eclipse). So I found myself wondering if eclipse could handle rails. Apparently there was some effort on this back around 2007, but it has fallen by the wayside. Given the ever changing nature of both rails and eclipse, this would need continual care and feeding I would think).

The suggestions is to use the following three vim plugins:

The Rails plugin

The Project plugin

Note that the NERD tree plugin does a similar thing.

The NERD tree plugin

In particular, note the tip to add this line to your vimrc to get a fn-F2 shortcut to toggle NerdTree
map  :NERDTreeToggle

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org