I stitched together a cheat sheet for NetBeans 6.0, boiling it down to what I find are the most useful shortcuts for Ruby and Rails stuff.

I’ve been using NB6 for a couple of weeks and I’m starting to feel good about it. A couple of tweaks after the initial install (of the Ruby flavor of NB6) that I have to make before I’m really happy:

• Go to Tools, Plugins, and install Extra Ruby Color Themes, Ruby Extra Hints, and Ruby RSpec Support
• Go to Options, Fonts & Colors, change “Profile” to “Ruby Dark Pastels” (this is the TextMate-like color scheme, I guess)
• A couple of things bug me about the color scheme – most notably, under Syntax Highlighting, Ruby, I have to change Mark Occurrences to the Inherited background (otherwise, whenever your cursor is in a variable, it and all it’s occurrences will light up on the page, which I find very distracting). I also like to change the color of the highlighted row under the Highlighting tab on that page (the default background is too bright for me).
• AutoComplete drives me crazy. I’ve always hated it – I feel like it slows my computer down and sometimes it even seems to derail me in the middle of typing something because the window comes up and somehow snags focus. I turn it off under Options, Editor, General (uncheck Auto Popup Completion Window).

Most of the TextMate snippets have been imported into NetBeans 6. I didn’t squeeze all of these into the cheat sheet because there are so many, and personally, I don’t use ‘em (there’s probably some irony in the fact that I’m too lazy to learn a shortcut). You can peep the list of default ruby snippets and rhtml snippets or just go search for a TextMate cheat sheet.

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For a no-cost, cross-platform IDE, NetBeans 6 may be hard to beat. I still feel like there are some minor stability issues, but for the most part it hums right along on my Ubuntu desktop and laptop (both Gutsy-AMD64 installs) and even works fairly well on my ASUS EeePC (running the pre-installed custom build of Xandros).