I realize most Ruby development on the Mac uses Textmate but I love Netbeans in the Windows environment and am wondering whether it's equally awesome on the Mac - even if it's swimming against the stream a little bit, would Netbeans pose any issues as a Ruby IDE on the Mac?
+2
A:
It won't pose any issues, but it doesn't really give you many benefits over using another editor - they are all practically the same, it's just the workflow and small bits of functionality that change. I guess it's down to personal preference - if you feel comfortable with Netbeans then it's fine for you to use it. However, TextMate is very popular because it does give a good level of built-in support for Ruby and Rails, it's a lot faster than Netbeans, and feels much more like a native app (which of course it is).
Ultimately it's up to you and what you want to get out of your editor/IDE.
Jamie Rumbelow
2009-05-23 01:41:23
'm new to the Mac and have only played with Textmate a little but it seems like it's just a basic text editor - you have to open your various Rails models and controllers in separate windows and then close them again - because Netbeans is an IDE, everything opens and closes into the same Editor pane. Plus you can open your Rails console without going to the Terminal. And it provides generators so you don't need to go to the Terminal when you want to create a model or run a rake task for example.
2009-05-23 01:53:04
You should watch some of the screencasts. TextMate is a lot more than that.
Chuck
2009-05-23 02:11:07
+1
A:
I've used Netbeans extensively on Mac and PC. For the Mac, it's essentially identical -- one subtlety is the interplay between ctrl and cmd (apple key). On the Mac, as for other Mac apps, cmd often performs the same role as ctrl on the PC, and ctrl is the same as right-click, for instance, cmd-clicking on method names / class names / render fragment names jumps to that file (if it can find it) and all the other Rails goodness that comes with 6.5+.
Netbeans + growl + autotest = awesomeness.
I also own Textmate but never been convinced.
Julian
2009-05-23 19:33:44
A:
I am another that is not convinced by Textmate or "that it is a lot more than that". For me it constantly broke and filled my code with logging messages. I think Textmate is living on glory days of when it was the best rails editor you could get. For me Netbeans is much better as a rails development environment unless you are of the hardcore, never use a mouse persuasion. All the cool snippet features ( which was Textmate's big deal ) have been replicated in Netbeans. It is slower, but not that slow, and good coding is not a race.
AND
Netbeans is free!!
Colin
2010-08-20 20:29:09