Since starting to write Rails apps, I hear people rave about TextMate but really I don’t see the point. What’s so great about it? I used it for the duration of the trial but during that time I felt completely under-powered. RubyMine, on the hand, had pretty much zero learning curve, easy to debug with breakpoints, and everything Rails-related accessible from the menus. Memory footprint is bit bigger, but so what? Memory is cheap. I can have debug sessions in both RubyMine and Flash Builder open at the same time and my laptop doesn’t creak. TextMate on the other hand seems entirely mystifying. I’ve heard it’s the editor you want if you’re comfortable with the shell, which I am, but I still don’t get it. I would rather have a convenient modern IDE that works the way I expect it. I still feel like I’m missing something though, so feel free to shoot me down in the comments …
Tags: ide, rails, rubymine, textmate
Textmate is developed by some rails guys so its what the cool kids use I guess. I use it, but because I didn’t know about Rubymine.
When you say Rubymine has a debugger, does it function like Flexbuilders debugger? Meaning can you set break points and the like?
That’s right, exactly like the debugger in FB, or in any decent IDE. You can step through the code and look at the variables, etc.
For me, the reason to use a general-purpose text editor (jEdit) over an IDE is that I work with too many languages. When you program in rails one week, a php project the next, edit a bunch of XML data files, tweak some Java code for your build system, do some AS3/MXML, and wrap it all up with a little C++ and Objective-C on the weekends, having 5 or 6 different IDEs is just plain inconvenient. I’m really looking forward to Xcode 4 coming out, because I have a feeling it will prove very strong competition for Eclipse on the Mac.