Recommendation for Emacs/Ruby setup

Question

So far I'm very happy with my Clojure/Emacs setup but failed to come even close to this experience when using Ruby. I tried the enhanced ruby mode (no syntax highlighting) and robe (which fails with a syntax error as soon as the console is started). I would really appreciate any tips where to find some proper guidelines on how to configure Emacs for Ruby.

BTW: I do not need any Rails support. Just plain Ruby support.

Answer 1

I find the following setup quite good:

• ruby-mode from Emacs 24.4 or above - it's quite an improvement over the one in Emacs 24.3
• inf-ruby - a way to run irb/pry inside Emacs
• smartparens - superb handling of delimiters like (), [], {}, do/end, etc.
• yari - ri interface for Emacs
• ruby-tools - adds commands to turn a string to symbol, symbol to string, single to double quote string, double to single quote string, clear string, interpolate and more...
• flycheck + RuboCop for on-the-fly linting and code style checking

AFAIK many rubyists are also using yasnippet. I've given up on trying to find a good "intelli-sense" alternative for Ruby in Emacs, but other than that I'd say the above setup is quite solid. It's pretty much what you'd get by using Prelude's Ruby module.

Answer 2

This isn't a real answer since I'm not a Ruby user but I am tied into the Emacs community and these things have shown up on my radar before

• http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RubyLanguage (the wiki, although sometimes out of date, is a good place to start from for queries like this).
• http://crypt.codemancers.com/posts/2013-09-26-setting-up-emacs-as-development-environment-on-osx/ was recently on HN and has a detailed setup.
• Sacha Chua's chat with Avdi Grimm mentions a few of the tools that Avdi uses for his Ruby work.