RubyMine, an IDE for Ruby, Rails and so much more.

Published on Mar 09, 2009

Ok, first let me be really clear, I’m not a JetBrains fan boy.
Yes, I use ReSharper and yes, I also use TeamCity at home as my Continuous Integration server for some of my projects.

I also use Cruise Control.Net and Jenkins CI in other projects (sometimes both in the same project, to do different things)

But the guys from JetBrains do really good products, ex: TeamCity is ,IMHO, the most friendly CI server of the three to set up and ReSharper makes practicing TDD or BDD not just possible but highly enjoyable.

So when I came across RubyMine a few months ago I decided to give it a try. I have been using different IDE‘s and Editors on my adventures into the Ruby world but even when I found some of them really good I never really feel at home.

NetBeans with Ruby support was the one that provided the best IDE experience for me so far, and for text editors I mostly used Scite that comes with Ruby. (I do all my programming on a PC so no TextMate for me and for whatever reason e didn’t click with me. I also tried PSPad, my favorite text editor for everything else, but it didn’t work with ruby. I guess my very basic knowledge of the language didn’t help either.

So here are some of the features I like on RubyMine some of them shared by NetBeans.

Note:I’m not giving out on NetBeans since it’s free and has support for PHP.

Easy code navigation.

From a view clicking in the A icon will open the proper controller and position the cursor in the right action.

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Now if you are in a controller and click in the View icon besides the action you will navigate to the view if it exist.

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If the views is not available yet RubyMine will open a prompt to create it.

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Also some classes have a (dependencies?) icon beside its declaration that help you to browse to base classes and partial implementations

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Code hints and code analysis

The familiar (for ReSharper users) yellow light bulb, shows up in some cases giving you hints on how to improve your code. In this case I positioned the cursor on the ‘new’ string and the id understands that I’m referring to the new action, so it suggest to use a symbol instead.

ScreenHunter_05 2009-03-08 22.41.49

On the right hand you have hints (yellow, red) about your code. Even on html code.

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In this case makes the sensible suggestion of get rid off the B tag and replace with some CSS or the STRONG tag:

ScreenHunter_10 2009-03-08 22.55.14

Refactorings

Of course you have some Refactorings available for you.

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Code analysis:

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And find usages:

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Conclusion

This are just some of the features, for a complete list visit the JetBrains site, most of them also work in JavaScript files and html files, so you can use them in other projects not just Ruby ones.