Does RubyMine 2.0 earn it's $99 as a Rails IDE?

Question

I've seen a lot of blogs talk about RubyMine lately, as a best of breed Rails IDE. Currently I am using NetBeans IDE for my Ruby and Rails stuff, but I was wondering if anyone here would personally recommend this IDE, and reasons why I should fork out $99 for it!?

Answer 1

I use it, and as of right now, don't think it's quite worth it - if you like working with a full IDE, RadRails is as good (though in different ways), and free. I admit, I haven't got all the keyboard shortcuts in RubyMine down, so I'm not as productive with it as I hope to be, but I find myself doing stuff at the command line more than I think should be necessary with a 'real' IDE. It's been pretty stable for me (on linux), the source control integration is good, and it's not as slow as it used to be (though I still end up in vim at times, if I don't want to load it). I'm hoping a 'plugin' ecology will develop around it. Overall, it's a pretty good product, but not (yet?) worth the $99 over RadRails (haven't used NetBeans)

Answer 2

I used NetBeans for a while, before switching to RubyMine some month ago prior the first release. I can say the IDE is worth the entire price.

RubyMine has the best autocomplete support I have ever seen. It's a really clever IDE, it can understand most of the Rails "magics" including method references by symbols

class Controller

  before_filter :mymethod

  def mymethod
  end
end

metaprogramming, Rails/Ruby convention and so on.

Also, RubyMine 2.0 introduced i18n support for Rails and, having to maintain a couple of Rails apps localized in 5 different languages, I must say this is an awesome feature.

It supports the latest testing frameworks in the Ruby ecosystem, including Shoulda, Test::Unit, RSpec and Cucumber. Unfortunately it lacks RCov support, while I know Netbeans is going to integrate it.

A couple of co-workers are still using NetBeans and they often have problem with SVN because Netbeans doesn't auto-refresh the working copy when you update it outside the IDE. RubyMine has an excellent SCM support and ships with SVN, CVS and even Git compatibility.

I don't want this answer to seems like a RubyMine promo, so I encourage you to give it a try for 30days then make a choice.

Answer 3

I've tried Netbean, RadRails and RubyMine. In my personal opinion it's well worth the money, and I heartily agree with weppos.

Your best bet it to try the evaluation version for a while and make your own mind up. I find IDE preferences are very subjective, the only real way to know if it's any good is to try it for yourself.

Answer 4

it is a little buggy and a big resource eater but has the better "intellisense", refactoring, and complementary areas support (haml) i ever seen for ruby/rails. it's appearance under mac os x is lame and is much less usable (in terms of UI usability) than any other ide. i guess that in the next major versions it will become the ruby/rails killer-ide. i would wait to buy it, as i see it as an immature project right now.

Answer 5

I've used Netbeans for a while(1+ year) now. and have tried RadRails too. but i choose RubyMine cause:

• the base IDE is very solid and has a ton of plugins
• it's generally more intelligent and have good refactoring abilities.
• it supports a good number of other frameworks and technologies outside ruby and rails (like SaaS, haml, cucumber, shouldr, rspec...etc).
• it supports my favorite version control system: git.

all in all i think if you take some time to learn its key mappings, you can be very productive with it. you wouldn't need to use a shell at all(well sometimes you might need to but...you get the idea).

just my 2 cents

Answer 6

I've been using Rubymine to develop Rails apps for a while now. There was a point a few months ago when I would have been hesitant to recommend paying for it. However the rate at which it has been improving and adding new features is really impressive. If you're doing BDD (with Cucumber) then it's worth buying just for the step completion and navigation. Also the features that have come from IntelliJ like Javascript, HTML, CSS, VCS support etc are excellent.

Answer 7

Suffice to say that Rubymine (2.5 EAP version) is the first IDE I actually like. Having used to excellence of developing Rails apps in OS X with TexMate, when I switched the job and was forced to get along without OS X, I was quite satisfied to find Rubymine.

A veteran Emacs user (over 10 years) and recent Vim convert (gotta love the extremely powerful command system and short key bindings), I soon found that either the file navigation, cucumber editing or refactoring support was quite lacking in those. With Rubymine, I get TextMate-style file navigation which is just awesome, the only IDE which actually has a type inferencing engine and is able to capture many run-time errors during the editing phase, plus all the features I ever used in Rails projects.

Yes, I'm going to buy the software when they release 3.0 or so, and I don't know if I'll use TextMate in the future when I get again access to OS X. They say the OS X support is very good in Rubymine EAP versions, but what's nice that you can have that for every other OS as well.