Recently JetBrains decided to build a Ruby specific IDE called RubyMine based on their very awesome IntelliJ IDEA product. They already had a very nice Ruby plugin for IntelliJ which in my opinion was the best Ruby integration for any IDE (sorry NetBeans fanboys), but decided to package a stripped down version of IntelliJ specifically for Ruby. Now don’t get me wrong, when I say stripped down, I definitely don’t mean stripped down in features, because this IDE rocks.
A couple of really nice features that I miss when using fine text editors such as TextMate, are code-completion and SCM integration. I know TextMate has a psuedo code-completion by pressing the Esc key, and that there is a Git bundle for TextMate, but it in no way compares to the elegance of RubyMine. I mean come on, when I’m still trying to learn the API, stuff like the screenshots below really help.
Code completion in RubyMine
The next feature I really miss is the visual Red/Green bar of running unit tests. While the RSpec bundle for TextMate provides a really nice HTML output giving that Red/Green bar experience, when running simple TestUnit tests you don’t get this, and I found that the bundle constantly switched back and forth from RSpec to Ruby and that got a little annoying.
RubyMine's test runner output
The biggest reason I will likely be switching to RubyMine for my Rails projects is that it’s cross platform. While I prefer to do my development in either Mac OSX or Linux, some of the developers on my projects may be more comfortable in Windows. Using RubyMine allows us to develop using a common tool making it easier to pair and help each other out without having to lose productivity due to the context switching from one development environment to another. I can’t wait for the 1.0 release of this product because it will only get better.
RubyMine's generators
Running Rake tasks couldn't be easier
