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I need to move to a "serious" Ruby (on Rails) IDE now that Netbeans is discontinuing Ruby support. I don't want to start a trolling war, but could I'd love to hear the pros and cons of using TextMate or RubyMine as an IDE, to help me choose which I should invest my time in, especially from people who are using one of them daily ("in the trenches").

My thoughts at the moment are:

TextMate

  • Pro: Seems to be the de facto standard
  • Con: I'm a bit concerned that updates are few and far between
  • Con: I come from a Java background, so such a lightweight editor (rather than a heavyweight IDE) would be a bit of a culture-shock to me

RubyMine

  • Pro: Frequent updates
  • Pro: Ruby/Rails focused, plus built-in support for common gems
  • Con: Things like refactoring/autocomplete are easy to confuse (I've been trying the RubyMine trial for the last few days)
  • Con: It can stall from time to time

Also, I realise that vim is very popular but I find that having no menus/native-gui a bit frustrating, especially when you get used to using keyboard shortcuts for things that are completely different to what's available in the rest of the OS. So please stick to just TextMate and RubyMine

iainbeeston
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    An editor you may wish to consider in your list alongside TextMate: [Sublime Text 2](http://www.sublimetext.com/2). It's currently in alpha, but I've been using it as a TextMate replacement for a few weeks now and I rather like it. It also has support for most TextMate snippets, themes, etc. so you can install them if you have them already. – Michelle Tilley Apr 20 '11 at 02:14
  • possible duplicate of [Ruby IDEs: any worth looking at?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/774117/ruby-ides-any-worth-looking-at) – the Tin Man Apr 20 '11 at 09:16
  • Also, possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/262896/what-do-you-think-of-rubymine and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1806987/does-rubymine-2-0-earn-its-99-as-a-rails-ide – the Tin Man Apr 20 '11 at 09:18
  • @the-tin-man Yeah I did look around for other posts, but in my case I'm torn between just those two, rather than the open-ended question of what is the best editor/IDE, or what options there are out there. – iainbeeston Apr 23 '11 at 05:57
  • You should take a look at Coda. Built-in terminal, preview windows, etc. is very, very handy, and the side-by-side split view with terminal running in the background is very handy for writing specs beside your real code and having them auto test in the next tab. It's great! – Andrew Jul 31 '11 at 15:22
  • +1 to RubyMine, haven't used TextMate though – rubish Jul 31 '11 at 15:25

3 Answers3

18

I have used both Textmate and Rubymine (and netbeans... and vi...). I choose to stay with Rubymine (after netbeans ruby support was discontinued). However i still use vi on and off.

Advantages of Rubymine over Textmate

  • It's actually an IDE (might be a disadvantage if you are a 'editor person' and not a 'IDE person').
  • Based on the solid, proven intelliJ IDEA base.
  • Good support for other frameworks and tech around the ruby eco system (etc: cucumber, bundler, rvm...)
  • Autocomplete (this is actually pretty good, given that ruby is a dynamic lang)
  • Ability to easily browse the source code for any gem you are using
  • Great refactoring tools
  • 'Find in project' works pretty fast when compared to textmate
  • Good VCS (GIT specially) integration.
  • Great plugins for the IDE
  • Good integration with rails (run rake tasks, generators, bundle install... all from within the IDE).

Disadvantages over Textmate

  • not as lightweight
  • not as hip ;)
  • you might miss some of your favorite bundles
  • consume more power/memory and resources in general
  • can feel a bit slow at times.

Rubymine is a great IDE IMHO. I would prefer that over textmate. But i can't say its the best for you. And you will still use the console a lot even if you start using Rubymine.

Yeonho
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thekindofme
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TextMate is the choice of many serious Rails devs (besides Vim as has been noted in comments). RubyMine is slow and bloated. I started out Rails dev with that and quickly switched to TextMate after it crashed a couple times. I think you will find that you're not looking for a heavy editor/training wheels when doing rails dev. Autocomplete is annoying and you'll want to do pretty much everything in terminal anyway.

VNO
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    TextMate is the choice of most serious Rails devs. This is false, I'm not claiming I'm some sort of serious Rails dev, however Vim suites me just fine. – Mike Lewis Apr 20 '11 at 01:58
  • I write a huge amount of code in vim and its variants on Macs, PCs and Linux boxes at work. I use TextMate when I'm writing examples for StackOverflow. – the Tin Man Apr 20 '11 at 02:03
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    Good for you guys, but the OP was asking for TextMate v. RubyMine. Vim is obviously fine too. – VNO Apr 20 '11 at 03:02
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    Some "concerns" are just over the the wording in this response that asserts *opinion/speculation* as a *fact/statistic* without justification. I have give a +1 to counter-act the -1, with the desire to see that the wording of this response is updated. –  Apr 20 '11 at 03:07
  • I'm afraid that vim just isn't my cup-of-tea, even though I hear it's a great ruby editor – iainbeeston Apr 23 '11 at 05:58
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    "many serious Rails devs" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman – Andrew Grimm Jul 05 '12 at 05:43
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Though TextMate doesn't have the bells and whistles that an IDE like Netbeans offers for Java, it has a lot of flexibility so don't discount it.

I'm so used to vim that it's my #1 choice for any editing, but TextMate is almost scary-smart, especially when you start digging in and using all the snippets. Watch the videos on the site and see. Something else TextMate has going for it, is it supports a BIG list of languages, so it will be usable if you are working in Ruby, Perl, Python, shell, etc.

the Tin Man
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