I currently use TextMate for all my Rails development, and I like it very much, but I wonder if I'm missing anything by not using an IDE. Has anyone switched from using TextMate or another powerful text editor to a Ruby IDE? Am I missing anything?
+3
A:
Aptana RadRails is one of the best Ruby IDEs out there, with Rails support, HTML editors, etc. It is a plugin for Eclipse, and is also supplied standalone.
Lucas Jones
2009-04-21 19:09:10
My oh my, though, it EATS memory. But if you're used to Eclipse, it's a good transitional IDE.
Sarah Mei
2009-04-21 19:20:46
@Sarah: As I found out this morning when I installed it on my freshly-reformatted old machine. Eek! Its barly usable. NetBeans is like that too. It took an hour to install, and then keeps crashing!
Lucas Jones
2009-04-22 15:50:46
+4
A:
JetBrains, the people who created the legendary IDEA IDE for Java, have RubyMine in beta. DHH has mentioned it, so it must be good!
John Topley
2009-04-21 19:09:24
+1
A:
I use Netbeans because I like the test support and test coverage features combined with the fact that I can use it for multiple languages & environments. They really try to provide a complete environment but I find I still have to step out to the command line a lot - starting thinking_sphinx, running cucumber, tailing logs etc.. so it is never quite comprehensive. It is also slow as hell on my slow as hell laptop.
I used the eclipse rails plugin for a while and it is also pretty good but Netbeans had a pretty good feature surge for 6.5. that won me over.
srboisvert
2009-04-21 20:22:19
+2
A:
TextMate is king for Development on Mac, it's not too bloated and has so many good bundles made by the developers that use those particular languages. Can't be beat in my opinion.
railsninja
2009-04-22 04:29:23
+2
A:
In my opinion textmate is the best IDE if you have a Mac. It is highly customizable and you can pretty much do everything you want with it. Plus a lot of developers are using textmate for rails and therefore creating scripts and features that you can import and use.
I'm using Aptana with radrails when I'm on windows, but it's not as good. Plus you can't customize it as much. The other issue is that since it's based on eclipse it's quite ressource intensive and from my experience it's not as stable as textmate. Aptana has some cool features, like being able to call script/generate and rake tasks directly from the interface, but this is something I could live without.
marcgg
2009-04-22 16:57:19
+1
A:
I think IntelliJ/RubyMine is pretty good because I've been coding Java for a while. There's some feature holes for Rails development, but I expect that Jetbrains will quickly fix those in coming versions.
I just got turned onto Textmate because my laptop is a Powerbook 12" G4. Running IntelliJ is pretty snappy, but it makes the fans run constantly with a volume approaching "airplane engine". Working with Textmate keeps my laptop quiet.
dbrown0708
2009-04-22 17:55:05
+1
A:
If you're on Windows you may want to look at "Ruby in Steel"
I've just found it and have not worked with it much nbut the experience so far is good. So if you use VisualStudio for your job this may be a nice addon to help get Ruby into the same environment.
Yooakim
2009-04-22 18:27:01
I've been monkeying about with it for the past couple releases. It's not bad, but has a way to go before they can get the money they are asking for it though.
Chad Ruppert
2009-04-27 14:31:01
+1
A:
On a mac it is probably not worth it as TextMate is very optimized for Rails development through bundles. I did use AptanaIDE when I was on Windows though. The main problem here is not the IDE itself but the fact that it is not useable (as in snappy enough) on the machine I had. And strangely enough for a Ruby programmer I believe that a program that makes editing unformatted text feel sluggish on a 1Ghz/Gbyte machine is doing something wrong.
nasmorn
2009-04-27 14:26:52