Ruby Survey Results

Highlights: 1,000 responders, of which 470 Rails and 530 Ruby; TextMate is the most popular tool globally, but the Vi family is slightly preferred on the Ruby side. Thanks, everyone, for pitching in!

Methodology · The questions were:

1. Is your work mostly Rails, or do you do significant non-Rails Ruby development?

2. Which developer tools do you use? Pick as many as you want.

On the latter, the options were (presented in random order to each participant):

• TextMate

• Emacs family

• Vi family

• Eclipse

• NetBeans

• IntelliJ

• Other (please say which)

I announced the survey on this blog, on the ruby-lang mailing list and IRC channel, and asked someone to do the same in the Rails equivalents. I cut off the survey when the sample size reached 1,000, after six days.

I downloaded a .xls of the results from SurveyMonkey, and did a little hand-sanitation. Lots of people had listed tools (irb, rake, autotest, you name it) that weren’t actually editors. Also, there were a few editors that showed up often enough under “Other” that probably they should have been among the choices.

So I did three flavors of cleanup: First, where they’d listed Aptana and/or RadRails, but hadn’t listed Eclipse, changed that to an Eclipse vote. Second, I regularized the names of Komodo, jEdit, sciTE, and so on. Third, I removed all the non-editor tools.

Then a ran a little Ruby script to group the totals by into the “mostly-Rails” and “significant non-Rails Ruby” buckets, using the labels “Rails” and “Ruby”.

Results · [Corrected: Editing error had undercounted sciTE.]

First of all, the sampling methodology is laughably unscientific; the audience is self-selecting. I asked SurveyMonkey to accept only one result from any given IP address, but we know how much that’s worth. I find the results interesting, but they’d be bounced out of any refereed journal.

You can look at SurveyMonkey’s decent presentation of the results; it doesn’t group by Ruby/Rails, but it does allow you to look at the raw “Other” comments.

Lots of people selected multiple tools; in aggregate, the 1,000 responses named 1,575.

Here are three quick graphs summarizing the results, with bars for any software that got at least 10 votes, which is 0.1%.

Here’s pretty much all the data, in a sortable table (click on the column headers).

	All	%	Ruby	%	Rails	%
TextMate	478	30.35	216	24.24	262	38.30
Vi family	345	21.90	217	24.35	128	18.71
Emacs family	198	12.57	132	14.81	66	9.65
NetBeans	184	11.68	93	10.44	91	13.30
Eclipse	175	11.11	101	11.34	74	10.82
IntelliJ	32	2.03	18	2.02	14	2.05
sciTE	21	1.33	15	1.68	6	0.88
jEdit	17	1.08	11	1.23	6	0.88
Komodo	17	1.08	12	1.35	5	0.73
gedit	14	0.89	7	0.79	7	1.02
E Text Editor	11	0.70	5	0.56	6	0.88
BBEdit	8	0.51	7	0.79	1	0.15
Xcode	7	0.44	7	0.79	0	0.00
TextPad	6	0.38	6	0.67	0	0.00
Kate	5	0.32	4	0.45	1	0.15
Notepad++	5	0.32	4	0.45	1	0.15
SubEthaEdit	5	0.32	3	0.34	2	0.29
KDevelop	4	0.25	4	0.45	0	0.00
Ruby In Steel	4	0.25	4	0.45	0	0.00
Notepad2	3	0.19	1	0.11	2	0.29
UltraEdit	3	0.19	2	0.22	1	0.15
ConTEXT	2	0.13	2	0.22	0	0.00
Firebug	2	0.13	0	0.00	2	0.29
joe	2	0.13	2	0.22	0	0.00
Locomotive	2	0.13	0	0.00	2	0.29
nano	2	0.13	2	0.22	0	0.00
Smultron	2	0.13	1	0.11	1	0.15
TextWrangler	2	0.13	1	0.11	1	0.15
3rdRail	1	0.06	0	0.00	1	0.15
Acme	1	0.06	0	0.00	1	0.15
Arachno	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
Coda	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
FTE	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
Glade	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
irb	1	0.06	0	0.00	1	0.15
Kedit	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
KWrite	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
Other	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
PIDA	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
Programmer's Notepad	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
PSPad	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
Quanta Plus	1	0.06	0	0.00	1	0.15
RDE	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
sam	1	0.06	0	0.00	1	0.15
SlickEdit	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
STEAD	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00
Textpad	1	0.06	1	0.11	0	0.00

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