Is there an IDLE-like editor for ruby on Windows or Ubuntu? [closed]

Question

I'd like to introduce my young cousin to a bit of programming. Ideally ruby, as that's what I'm familiar with. However finding a suitable text editor is a real pain. All I need of the editor is the ability to type a few lines of code, press 'Run' and get some results (or not, as the case may be). The simpler the editor the better, I don't need Netbeans, Eclipse etc. What I want to avoid is the necessity of using the terminal to run scripts, TextWrangler, Textmate and IDLE for Python can do this. Unfortunately I need something that will work on Windows, or Ubuntu, otherwise I would have just installed Textmate on his laptop.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can do this in SciTE, which is bundled with the Windows Ruby installer or can be downloaded here. Click Tools > Go or press F5. It's an all-around good (and fast) editor with not a lot of bells and whistles.

This might require some configuration to make sure SciTE knows where your Ruby executable is. I believe the configuration for this is in Options > Open ruby.properties > command.go.*.rb.

Answer 2

On Ubuntu... How about the good old Gedit application? The Tool Launcher Plugin will enable you to run any external task (including the execution of the current open file.