Pros and cons to RubyMine and TextMate

Question

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

Answer 1

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.