RubyMine 1.0: A Cross Platform Ruby IDE People Actually Seem To Love
Back in April, we posted about the release of the beta of RubyMine 1.0, an IntelliJ IDEA based Ruby and Rails IDE. This month, the final RubyMine 1.0 was released for public consumption. It's a great IDE - check out the free 30 day trial to get a feel for it.
The Quick-Fire Feature List
RubyMine has a pretty crazy feature set. Just some of the biggest points to whet your appetite:
- Code completion
- Automatic code inspections - basic errors pointed out with one-click quick fixes.
- Advanced navigation - including seeing overridden methods on the fly
- Version control integration - SVN, Git, CVS, and Perforce
- Integrated gem manager
- IRB and Rails consoles
- Assisted unit testing - supporting RSpec, Test::Unit, and test/spec
- Quick documentation lookups
- Suitable for use with MRI Ruby 1.8.x, JRuby, IronRuby, and MacRuby. Does not support 1.9-specific features yet.
If you want to learn more about the background, motivation, and technical details behind RubyMine, check out this awesome interview with JetBrains developer Dmitry Jemerov.
Praise!
IDEs don't tend to be popular in Rubyland, but from observing people's responses to RubyMine both online and at RailsConf, I think RubyMine might well be the first cross-platform Ruby IDE that developers actually seem to love in droves. Short of a few minor issues, I'm seeing very little negative towards RubyMine, and even a few people who supposedly "hate" IDEs have given it a fair trial - high praise, indeed.
But.. It's A Commercial Product
Depending on your stance, one potential downside is that RubyMine is not an open source IDE. It's a proprietary product available under two licenses, a free license for proven open source developers (there are some criteria), and the more typical $99/£74 commercial license. Compared to what JetBrains charges for its Java IDE, this is a bargain, though ultimately may be hard for some Rubyists to stomach. Luckily a thirty day trial is available to challenge your opinions..
Coming down the line, RubyMine 1.1 is already in the release candidate stage, and in the fall will be coming RubyMine 1.5 with anticipated support for Ruby 1.9, Cucumber, RCov, an integrated SQL console, and improved refactoring tools.
Disclaimer: JetBrains, the company behind RubyMine, is a sponsor of Ruby Inside. This is not a "sponsored post," however.
May 27, 2009 at 2:32 am
I've used both NetBeans and RadRails/Aptana Studio on Ubuntu linux...RubyMine is hands down the better product.
NetBeans lacks the features of RubyMine and even if RadRails/Aptana had the features, the Eclipse platform is far too sluggish and cumbersome. RubyMine FTW!
Thanks to JetBrains for the half off deal and keep up the great work!
May 27, 2009 at 8:25 am
I purchased my license. The best Ruby IDE currently around, which actually manages to not get in the way but make you a more productive developer.
May 27, 2009 at 9:17 am
Not a commercial product? Isn't 75% of the Ruby world using Textmate?
RubyMine has a lot of potential. Used it for a week before switching back to Textmate. 1.0 had major performance issues for large Rails projects, and lack of Haml support was a real drag. Some amazing feature though, like ctrl click on any method to go straight to the source (including built in Rails and Ruby methods... very cool).
1.5 and 2.0 might be game changers if they fix it up a bit
May 27, 2009 at 9:58 am
I would get RubyMine, it costs like a TextMate, but it's much more powerful.
Waiting for full i18n support and performance fixes.
In RM1.0.5/Ubuntu there's an ugly bug, when all dropdown menus have huge spacing between items.
Keep up a good work, guys!
May 27, 2009 at 3:03 pm
The criteria for getting a free license is pretty tough. I got denied because I offer commercial hosting of my open source application.
May 27, 2009 at 6:28 pm
I wonder if RubyMine is a native Cocoa application. I tried (and liked) both NetBeans and RadRails, but unfortunately because they're Java apps, they tend to be annoyingly slow sometimes.
May 27, 2009 at 6:37 pm
I'm pretty sure it's not - it certainly doesn't look 100% native. This has been one of the few complaints I've heard and one of very few I have with it.
May 27, 2009 at 7:09 pm
The 1.1 release already has great Cucumber support. It both executes and syntax highlights Cucumber features.
May 27, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Correction to my comment above: that bug is only when running RubyMine on OpenJDK that ships w/ Jaunty.
May 27, 2009 at 9:02 pm
I need to try RubyMine. Going of of the listed features on the jetbrains website, Netbeans offers every feature RubyMine lists out of the box except git support that can be easily added with a plugin.
Netbeans comes packaged with Jruby and can be easily set up to use any version of ruby you have running on your system.
Feature for feature, Netbeans appears to beat RubyMine. I guess it comes down to the implementation of the IDE and the general functionality. My only gripe with Netbeans is that sometime it tries to do too much and can be slugish at times.
Netbeans is truly an impressive opensource IDE for multiple languages.
May 27, 2009 at 10:57 pm
I tried it on a rails project and it seemed to fill up with tips/warnings that @some_class_var is not found. Warns all through my views I think and certainly all through my models
Apart from that it seems interesting and slick, but at least for me all the bogus warnings waaay cluttered up the editor and made it hard to work. Went back to Netbeans to get some work done
(It's fast though)
May 28, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Nothing more than VIM is necessary...
May 28, 2009 at 7:55 pm
> @some_class_var
Hi Ed,
Please submit the example using RubyMine | Help | Submit feedback form. Actually due to lots of dynamic magic/hacks in Rails it's rather hard to analyze code in static. We are trying to decrease amount of false positives and continuously improve this.
>Feature for feature, Netbeans appears to beat RubyMine
Actually have you check QUALITY of issues? E.g. yes, Netbeans also have code completion and type inference but please compare it with RubyMine's one. Just take a look on several my examples (which I found in first 15 min of comparing both ide's), see comment #7 for http://www.rubyinside.com/rubymine-1-beta-intellij-ruby-and-rails-ide-1675.html
May 29, 2009 at 5:39 pm
I have to admit...I like the 1.1 release much better than past releases. It's come along way.
Two problems I have with it currently (the first most important):
1. It crashes regularly with Out of Memory errors. This is even after allocating 1024MB to the heap.
2. The keyboard shortcuts are foreign. They have an Eclipse mode which kinda mimics Eclipse...but no Netbeans mode.
Oh well. Hopefully both items will improve with time.
May 30, 2009 at 2:36 pm
I didn't like the interface. I couldn't even figure out how to set tabs & spacing. Also, no vi mode.
Not for me. Not yet.
June 1, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Hi Daniel,
> tabs and spacing
Settings | Code Style - it seems right easy to find..
> vi mode
In nearest future will be available vim emulation plugin. I heard that vim people like this plugin when working with IntelliJ IDEA. We will publish about it in RSS feed of our blog - http://blogs.jetbrains.com/ruby/
Hi John,
> no NetBeans mode
We are glad to see Netbeans guys on our form - http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/community/ruby. Let's create such keymap together. Please start new thread and let's discuss which shortcuts do you need.
June 1, 2009 at 6:50 pm
John,
As for crashes - please create topic on our forum or create issue in our JIRA, show us your RubyMine's logs files and we will try to resolve the problem. Obviously if we know reasons of some craches we will fix them. Unfortunately when our users don't tell us about RubyMine's crashes we cannot help them.. We are open to any feedback, good or bad =)
June 2, 2009 at 4:30 am
redmine is prolly nice--
for free alternatives...
For windows and rails, I really like rored. It doesn't get in your way :)
For Linux, I guess there's redcar editor, though a bit buggy at times (textmate clone written in Ruby)
June 2, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I'll give it a try when it supports Ruby 1.9.1.
June 4, 2009 at 9:44 am
Rubymine is great but I am having no end of issues with the company Jetbrains are using as a payment processor; very amateurish so far.
June 9, 2009 at 11:15 pm
I have used the beta releases, the RC releases and 1.0 and it hasn't been until 1.1 that I felt like considering buying a license and using something other then Textmate. The new HAML support in 1.1 is a great addition and they seemed to solve the odd jumpy problem that I found in 1.0. The only thing holding me back now is the $99 price tag and the fact that I am still not convinced that it is better than textmate.
June 14, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Looks cool but not very stable