

RubyMine 4 is Here to Make You Feel the Productivity - arunagarwal
http://blog.jetbrains.com/ruby/2012/02/rubymine-4-is-here-to-make-you-feel-the-productivity/

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mark_l_watson
I am a little biased since for many years JetBrains gave me free licenses for
their products (although I have bought my own for the last two years), but I
think that JetBrains has won the "IDE wars" as far as Java (including Clojure
support), Ruby, and Python development goes.

I live in IntelliJ, and also use RubyMine for much of my Ruby (and Rails and
Sinatra) development. My Python programming skills are weak, but that said, I
have an easier time using Python with PyCharm when I have to code in Python.

All that said, even though you can get 30 day free licenses, evaluating new
IDEs is a major time sink. If you are a Ruby developer who is all set up with
a TextMate or Emacs, etc. environment, it may still be worth the several hours
required to really kick the tires of RubyMine.

~~~
amishforkfight
I've been a full blown PHPStorm evangelist for quite some time now, really
nice IDE with great text editing capabilities.

~~~
Joeri
My zend studio license is gathering dust now that i'm a phpstorm user.
Surprisingly the zend server integration works quite well.

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willsulzer
I've been using RubyMine since nearly the first release. I started using the
'Ruby' plugin in the IntelliJ IDEA IDE for Java. IMHO RubyMine is far the away
the best IDE for RoR development on the market today. Here's a few of my
favorite things about RubyMine:

* Great dependency management. The source code of all your Gems is accessible/searchable and always present. If you're using a method in one of your external dependencies, you can 'command-click' through to the Gem source. * Full integration with RSpec/Cucumber. You don't need to break out of your work flow to run a test. You will be presented with a small panel that includes our test results and clickable stack traces of failures. * Good refactoring tools: Extract a variable or method from a code block with a few keystrokes. * Etc.. (the list goes on and on)

Given the nature of the Ruby language, the IDE can only do so much,
comparatively speaking. The Java IDEA IDE is arguably more powerful than
RubyMine because of the static analysis capabilities of the Java language. I'm
not at all saying that I would prefer to develop in Java because of 'better'
IDE support, it's quite the opposite really. RubyMine does a lot to increase
productivity by making assumptions about how developers will use the tool that
result in a very desirable RoR IDE.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
You mentioned dependency management, I've got a bunch of different client
projects with different versions of ruby + gems managed with rvm.

Does RubyMine respect those settings or is there some voodoo that you have to
do to get it working?

~~~
codenerdz
it does recognize your RVM gemsets and switches between them on the fly

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willsulzer
@codenerdz this is correct.

@michaelbuckbee You will have an option to choose a Ruby interpreter for each
project. Just be sure to not use any interpreter that has '[global]' in the
name and you'll be able to switch your gem sets seamlessly.

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bradleyland
UPDATE: So I contacted the folks at JetBrains just to see what they'd say, and
they pushed me through on the free upgrade!

Oh man.

> "Licensed Version: 3.0 and any new product release which is made generally
> available before 1 February 2012"

I missed the free upgrade by 14 days :( Oh well.

Congrats on the release, JetBrains!

~~~
padwiki
Nice to see you found decent customer service. My experience talking with them
about educational licenses was a textbook example of how not to land new
clients. Very disappointing.

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danso
It's funny, I hadn't heard of RubyMine at all until now...the choices that I
always hear about for Mac OSX Ruby development has so far been: Textmate,
BBEdit and vim.

Glad I checked HN this morning, going to give the 30-day demo a try.

(obviously, would love to read any first-hand experiences from Rails devs
about switching from TM to RubyMine, particularly the tradeoff in time getting
setup vs. time saved from the IDE-related benefits)

~~~
outside1234
RubyMine is great. A little slow, not Visual Studio quality yet, but light
years better than a text editor. Right click a test and you can debug it
interactively. That is easily worth $XX to me in productivity.

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mattgreenrocks
I really wanted to like RubyMine 3, but the UI on OS X barely tried to be
native. Has this gotten any better in the new release?

~~~
gnufied
The UI is much better on RubyMine 4. it has fullscreen Lion support and it
feels like your typical mac application now. :-)

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stephenhuey
I installed RubyMine 3 on Mac, Windows and Linux last spring. As much as I
like TextMate, I have to say that RubyMine helps me get Rails apps written
more quickly.

~~~
arunagarwal
Should try the 4.0. It's much faster :-)

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nona
I want to like it, because I know I could improve my workflow quite a bit.

However, IMHO:

\- the strict dependency on Sun's JRE instead of OpenJDK was the first
annoyance (I'm on Debian).

\- the UI is just overwhelming me - lots of things happening that I didn't ask
for. Maybe full-on IDEs just aren't for me.

\- my goodness it's slow!

\- non-native UI is another turn-off - crappy file selectors, plain ugly...

I tried to keep an open mind, but in the end I'm probably not the right
audience for something like this.

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levirosol
First, I am as much of an RM fanboy as you can get. I have used RM for a
couple years now, and often recommend it to others. RM 3 has been great and
keeps me highly efficient (I came from a .net world where I used R# a lot).

So I see RM 4 came out today. Normally with any software I rely on for my day
to day work, I wait at least a couple weeks before upgrading. However, against
better judgement I start the download and install it.

Now I'm screwed.

700% CPU spikes on project open. Then it hangs, completely unresponsive,
chewing up 100% CPU. I went to lunch and upon my return I see it's no longer
using 100% CPU but it's still hung.

My scenario, Ubuntu 11.10, i7, 8gb ram.

YMMV, but I'd wait if I were you.

P.S. Anyone from jetbrains, feel free to contact me. I love the product and am
confident this is a release day issue that you will get resolved quickly.

 __Update __

I found that opening a smaller project would work, but that the initial
(largish) project would not load. After allocating 4gb of ram to RM, it
finally opened.

edit this file to do the same: RM_path/bin/rubymine64.vmoptions

I went with these for settings:

-Xms512m -Xmx4096m -XX:MaxPermSize=700m -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=128m -ea

~~~
mark_l_watson
I saw this the first time I ran RM version 4 this morning. This spike is
caused by re-indexing your project(s).

I didn't see this the second time I started RM 4.

~~~
levirosol
I assumed the same and killed RM 4, reopened, and got the same behavior.

At the risk of being called insane, I did the same steps 3 times over and got
he same result.

~~~
sanswork
Are you waiting for usage to drop first?

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codenerdz
For those of you on Rubymine Release candidates or EAP, do not upgrade just
yet if you like to use Watches and Expressions in Debug mode, there is a
critical bug in 4.0

[http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/RUBY-10478?projectKey=RU...](http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/RUBY-10478?projectKey=RUBY#tab=Comments)

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bstar77
Does anyone know if RubyMine licenses can be transferred? I have a RM license
that I won at railsconf that I have used sparingly. It was issued on 5/25/11
so I'm not sure if it qualifies for this upgrade. I'd rather give it away than
it not be used. I liked RM, but I'm too tied into vim to switch.

~~~
arunagarwal
Hey, I think they have some upgrade plans.

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i_s
I love RubyMine's code formatter (never seen any other ruby formater that
handles multiline expressions as well), but much prefer editing in emacs. I
wish I could buy only the formatter, and run it from emacs.

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harshaw
We use rubymine but I never have been comfortable using it as my #1 developer
tool. Part of the problem may be that I am running it in a linux VM (albeit on
a box with tons of memory). Rubymine seems very slow and uses a ton of memory
(Java??). Rubymine has a ton of features and I use it when I need a good
visual tool (e.g: source control, source exploration)

I tried using it more aggressively but I keep falling back to emacs / rails
console / rails db / grep. At the end of the day RM just feels too sluggish.

~~~
codenerdz
Why are you using a cross-platform tool in a VM?

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harshaw
yeah, I guess you could mount your source tree into windows and use RM in
windows, but then all of the interesting features like rails integration
wouldn't likely work - and I have no interest in running rails on windows
since that isn't the deployment environment.

~~~
codenerdz
Honestly im running rubymine on mac since it seems as a better web development
tool than a windows machine, but considering that all you do with "deploying"
rails apps in development mode is reload a browser and that Rubymine supports
remote debugging quite well, I dont see why you wouldnt be able to edit your
source tree in a mounted drive while running your server in the VM.

This way you dont have to deal with memory/hd swap implications of running a
fairly memory hungry app inside a memory hungry virtualization layer.

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mike_h
Has anyone moved from a vim workflow to a tool like this and stuck with it?

I've found IDEs useful in the past when getting onboard an existing project
that's new to me, but I pretty quickly jump back to my text shredder and
terminal windows. Wondering if people see sustained productivity gains with
modern IDE tech. I know JetBrains has been a well-regarded IDE producer for
years now.

~~~
mynegation
I have moved from Vim to JetBrains' IDE for Python - PyCharm. In response
@netmute in this thread I know my way through vim, have edited in it for 10
years, have a bunch of plugins installed and know all the necessary wizard
spells, and still do a lot of other things in it. Yet, in case of Python I
have never looked back.

Python support in default vim is abysmal. You can probably beat vim to do
useful things with Python by installing a gajillion of plugins, but my time
that I would spend on it is not worth 200$ that I paid for PyCharm's corporate
license. Even then I am not sure Python support in vim would be anything close
to what I have in PyCharm out of box.

For me, the killer features in PyCharm were completion and on-the-fly code-
checking. There are definitely some vim packages for the former, but all I
tried were slow and/or buggy. And I have never found the replacement for the
latter. Other things like built-in graphical debugger with variable auto-
watcher and coverage visualization are the icing on a cake (and a very thick
one).

~~~
netmute
Thanks for sharing your experience. I didn't know that Python support was that
bad in vim. Can't say the same for Ruby thought.

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Roritharr
Never having used JetBrains IDEs before, i'd like to hear HN comments about
it? Are they good? For NodeJS f.e.?

~~~
david_a_r_kemp
Personally, feature-wise they're best of bread. IntelliJ is the best Java IDE
I've ever used, and ReSharper makes Visual Studio brilliant.

That said, they aren't always the fastest, and don't do anything to dispel my
hatred of Java UIs.

I used WebStorm to do node.js for a while, but haven't renewed my subscription
as it didn't provide me much extra from vim. The jQuery/Web stuff I've done
with WebStorm was pretty good though.

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phil303
Anyone out there who's tried it able to provide a mini review on this? This
seems like a nice update.

~~~
arunagarwal
Yeah. It is. It's faster.

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rsanheim
Can someone who is at least 'intermediate' in vim give me a reason as why a
vim guy would switch?

I'm saying this as someone who feels the need to use a debugger maybe once
every 3 or 4 months.

~~~
codenerdz
Could it be that you use debugger so rarely because its so difficult and not
user-friendly in command line mode? I run my application in debug mode all the
time so that i can stop it at any time and look at different values and states
at all possible levels of execution stack

~~~
rsanheim
Maybe. I find that if the code I'm working with is decently written (i.e.
paired on, done via decent TDD or BDD), then the need for a debugger rarely
arises.

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websymphony
I use aptana radrails every now and then. Does anyone have experience with
both and knows how they stack against each other?

~~~
veidr
Yes. RubyMine pretty much destroys Aptana's offering: better code insight and
completion, more reliable debugging, deeper featureset, relatively faster,
more stable, and a much faster rate of development and improvement with a much
more responsive development team.

Having said that, they both have the same fundamental drawback of being
ginormous slow ugly least-common-UI-denominator Java-based
frankenapplications.

Still, I tend to start my Ruby coding tasks in a text editor, but move to
RubyMine on anything where I'm hacking on it for more than a couple hours. I
can't imagine using anything else to do Rails development with all the
billions of files and open source gems involved in that king of thing--code
insight and smart jumping around within the source saves so much time,
cumulatively.

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outside1234
the only defect i see in the upgrade is that I can't use the "watch" variable
pane any longer. it looks like one of the drop downs is obscured or something.
this is under Snow Leopard. otherwise, upgrade was great - drag'n'drop install
without any obvious issues yet and is faster.

~~~
codenerdz
there is a critical bug filed against it, i hope they fix it soon

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Hominem
I'm going to check this out. I had some issues the last time I tried RubyMine
a month or two ago.

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gkumar
+1

~~~
david_a_r_kemp
See the little up arrow next to the original post? Use that please.

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vishnuatrai
+1

