Josh Kim dot Org

After a day of not getting anything working in symfony (why do you hate me so… yeah, it’s a long story), I come home and… start with doing something that I really wouldn’t mind “wasting” hours and hours with: Rails.

And what could it be, but from my feeds I find this little “gem” (I need to implement a “pun count”, and I should keep a running tally in the sidebar): Netbeans THE best ruby on rails IDE. Of course, being the nerd I am, I read quickly and make a decision to see how good it really is.

I always thought that the choice for Rails development on the Mac was TextMate. But it’s always good to question your options from time to time. TextMate has a lot of glaring issues. Here’s the list from Life on Rails.

• The indent key not being tab (it’s square bracket),

I’m not sure what he’s talking about here. When you hit the tab button on the keyboard, TextMate indents. However, when you want to indent a line from the middle, or indent multiple lines while selecting them, you do indeed use the keystroke “command + [" or "command + ]“. I didn’t think this was at all too annoying.

• The project window (drawer) disappearing from time to time,

I have not yet have this happen, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

• Dragging more folders into a project is like playing an 8-bit platform game: you have to be pixel perfect,

This issue, I don’t necessarily agree with. Maybe I’m just not getting the full picture.

• The find really means find (as in you can’t see where the search results are, you literally have to scan the page to find what textmate has found – and it never seems to wrap searches for me).

Once again, not sure what he’s talking about.

Here’s a list of my gripes with TextMate.

• Code folding only works if you yourself have made sure that you’ve indented your code properly. You can’t really go around and rely on TextMate to show you if you’ve properly closed your tags.
• Either I’m missing something, or the “escape” key doesn’t actually do any code completion whatsoever. Looks like there are a couple bundles out there that enable this functionality (such as this one for PHP)… TextMate is indeed light.
• Code highlighting is still broken. I still have it happen once in a while, be it HTML or Ruby. More of a minor annoyance here an there.
• It doesn’t feel like a 1.0.

Oh, but don’t hate: TextMate is definitely a very useful tool. It just took me a little bit of time and effort to get used to it. Heck, I’m still not used to it. But in reality, there was a bit of mystery wrapped around hype before I tried out the product.

But in other news, I do agree with the post from Life on Rails: I won’t be using Eclipse on the Mac for a long while. Slow and clunky. Unwieldy. Next.

Netbeans seems very intriguing, other than the fact that it’s written in Java. Yes, I have some weird fight against Java (must be the years of pain brought to me by any piece of software ever written in… or the fact that it captures the “coporate software development world” or yadda yadda yadda). Don’t ask me to explain it to you just yet. One day, it’ll dawn on me, but at this point in time, I feel kinda weird talking about writing Ruby code in a Java IDE.

Regardless, it looks really polished. I haven’t had too long to play with it, but I think I might switch into this. Of course, I still need to get a little bit more in touch with TextMate before I give myself the final shove towards Netbeans… and I still have to weigh the options.

Here’s yet another post on the subject. Ruby/Rails IDE Comparison: Idea, Netbeans, RadRails

It’s going to be a long night. Which is going to be a nice segue (dang it, I spelled it segway again… you marketing peoples and your misspelling of words for easy marketability) for another personal post.

EDIT: Updated Link for NetBeans post.