Excellent product: RubyMine 3.0

I bought RubyMine when it was first released and recently paid for upgrading to version 3.0. I switch between using TextMate (or GEdit on Linux) and RubyMine for both Ruby and for Rails development but since getting version 3.0 I spend almost all of my time using RubyMine.

Rails 3 support is very good and working with RVM is a nice new feature. I never used to use the Ruby debugger (at all!) but I have used it twice briefly in version 3.0. At least for Rails 3 development I still separately run both rails server and rails console outside of the IDE - a matter of personal preference.

I was using PyCharm (also by JetBrains) a lot for 2 weeks and the autocompletion hints and instant syntax warnings really helped me because my Python and Django skills are light-weight. I don't much need autocompletion hints and instant syntax warnings for Ruby and Rails development but it is unobtrusive and often useful.

The HTML, JavaScript, Erb, and Haml support seems better also. One feature that I don't use in daily development much but that I really like is View->Show Model Dependence Diagram that gives a great overview of your database model classes, their attributes, and their associations. Great for documentation and to serve as a reminder if I have not worked on a project for a while and need to get back into it. Quick navigation support to jump to definitions, etc. also saves me time.

EDIT: Since I wrote this blog I have started using the Model Dependence Diagram fairly often. It would be great to also have an option to show a UML class diagram.

My only real disappointment with version 3.0 is that it does not implement the tear-off editing tabs (i.e., tear-off to create a new and separate window) that the latest version of IntelliJ supports.

That said, using RubyMine is a comfortable experience and the IDE features stay out of my way until I need them.

Comments

  1. Topka1:13 PM

    Dragable tabs are coming in RubyMine 3.1 early next year.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant1:24 PM

    Thanks for the information Eugene, that is great!

    ReplyDelete

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