RadRails vs. Textmate
I’ve been working more with Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework lately, but one thing I’ve missed is a nice integrated environment. Coming from Java where I use Intellij, well, I guess I’m used to having a nice development environment with loads of features.
The Rails core development team prefers Textmate for some reason. I have a registered version of Textmate, but I’ve never really liked it. It seems too minimal to me. But of course, those 37Signals guys seem to think the appeal of minimal persists in every facet of life. Here’s hoping their women are not disappointed in them, if you know what I mean.
But seriously, its nice when you can have more than color syntax highlighting in your environment. Now to be honest, I haven’t fully explored all the edges of Textmate, so it may well be capable of many things that I wish for. However, I can say that I haven’t fully explored Intellij’s edges and yet its features and capabilities are somehow more evident.
So when I revisited RadRails recently, I was pleasantly surprised to feel as if I was in a cozy, yet more featured environment. Maybe the two packages can do the same things, but RadRails makes its features more evident to me.
Its funny how the smallest features are important. In Textmate, the command (if there is one) to indent and unindent a block of text was not as I expected. In RadRails, I was able to select a block of text and push it around as one with TAB and SHIFT-TAB. Of course, that’s just like Intellij, so it felt familiar. In Textmate, the same command destroyed my block.
I guess I’m not in that minimalist camp…at least not with IDEs. Like many things in life, size matters. I like a "bloated" IDE full of features, so give me RadRails over Textmate. Damn, I’m so uncool.
. Somehow I had a suspicion that RadRails would be too insulating…anyway, I’ll give TextMate a try.