Comments on: RadRails vs. Textmate

By: fortyseventeen

fortyseventeen — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:58:40 +0000

Thanks for the reply (and sorry I wasn’t apt enough to search your blog! . Somehow I had a suspicion that RadRails would be too insulating…anyway, I’ll give TextMate a try.

By: Bill Eisenhauer

Bill Eisenhauer — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:37:48 +0000

I don’t think your IDE necessarily influences how well you know a framework. I think learning a framework is achieved by solving real problems and curiously looking into its underlying source code.

As for RadRails, shortly after I wrote that post, I switched back to Textmate. RadRails was blowing up on me and I finally got too frustrated with it. Also, it looked like its release schedule wasn’t too regular.

The Pragmatic Programmers have a forthcoming Textmate book and Geoffrey Grossenbach also has a Peepcode episode on Textmate, so you should be able to get up to speed with those resources. Its actually quite powerful — you just have to hang in there and learn the shortcuts.

By: fortyseventeen

fortyseventeen — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:02:02 +0000

I’m very surprised that no-one’s commented on this yet, and that this is the only good comparison of the two IDEs. Being such, though, I’d like to ask a relevant question.

I’m just starting to fiddle with Rails, but I want an excellent IDE; all that your commentary has done is make clearer what I’ve already suspected: that TextMate is the ultimate, simplistically usable toolset, but that RadRails gives me the whole workshop. Somehow I think that using TextMate would be “healthier” for me, but I’d need some time to get up to speed. There’s also the obvious fact that RadRails is free.

This problem is really bugging me, because I worry that I won’t get enough experience with the inner workings of Rails to use it effictively. So, my question is this:

Having been using RadRails since June, how well do you think you understand Rails itself?