Mark Weston wrote in post #950097: > Well, firstly let's be clear I'm not trying to sell RubyMine as my ideal > IDE. I've paid for it, but I'm sometimes quite equivocal about whether > it's > much better than a terminal/editor combination.
Exactly. > (Mind you, on the days > I've > needed to use the debugger I've been very glad to have it. But I'm only > starting out with Rails and that hasn't happened very often yet). If you're only starting out with Rails, I wonder if you're fully aware of the available options. Have you used the command-line debugger? > > But I haven't tried all the IDE options available, and there are > features > that are standard for other languages and environments that would be > just as > valuable to Ruby/Rails. Such as? > I think it's daft to assert that Rails devs, > just > because they use Rails, can't benefit from an IDE. What's daft about that? The nature of Rails is such that conventional IDE features really do it no good at all. Perhaps a different sort of IDE would be helpful, but (with the possible exception of RubyMine) I'm not sure such a thing exists yet. > > Very little of the duplicated and >> generated boilerplate that IDEs are so good at maintaining is necessary >> in Rails, so IDEs have no real advantage that I can think of, and in my >> experience they slow everything down. >> > > I agree about the code generation, but I'm not sure where you think IDEs > slow you down so much. A 20 - 30 second load time may not be fun but > you > only have to sit through it once a day,. True, but big IDEs (being more complex programs) are generally slower than simpler editors. In my experience, they also make common Rails shell tasks harder, not easier. > >> Anything my machine can > >> > do >> > is something I don't have to. Scrolling through an RDoc page for the >> > 100th >> > time is a waste of my time if my IDE can remind me of what I'm looking >> > for >> > immediately. >> >> How does your IDE help with that? >> > > Auto-completion and context-sensitive help and documentation; You don't need an IDE for that. KomodoEdit and jEdit do this too. > for me two > of > the most valuable tools for working with a large framework without > having to > memorise APIs But you *should* be memorizing the API. (To be fair, I'm constantly checking docs as I develop -- usually in my Web browser. I've yet to see in-editor documentation that's as convenient to use.) > >> >> > And I most especially want as much debugging help as >> > possible. >> >> How does your IDE help with that? >> > > By actually having a debugger! I have a debugger too, without an IDE. Do you even know about ruby-debug, or are you just stuck in a knee-jerk IDE mentality? > > Mark Best, -- Marnen Laibow-Koser http://www.marnen.org [email protected] -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
