RubyMine 4 is Here to Make You Feel the Productivity | Hacker News Reader

RubyMine 4 is Here to Make You Feel the Productivity

blog.jetbrains.com

85 pointsarunagarwal56 comments

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.

Sweet: I just installed 4.0 and my existing license for 3.x is new enough for a free upgrade. Putting away my credit card...

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

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

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.

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?

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

@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.

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!

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.

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)

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.

Not to detract from RubyMine, but I've never had a problem with ruby-mode in emacs. I also don't rely on autocomplete at all, so this may be an issue that i never deal with.

Don't forget Sublime Text 2.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

This happened to me when PHPStorm 3 came out, after awhile of having it open, it started to run normal. It's like it had to index all the projects and settings again.

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.

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.

Are you waiting for usage to drop first?

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...

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.

Hey, I think they have some upgrade plans.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I highly doubt that anyone confident in vim would even consider going back to an IDE.

Anyway, IF there is anyone I would really like to hear the story.

There's a fairly decent vim plugin for all of the JetBrains IDEs called IdeaVIM. Here's a post from the same blog about it:

http://blog.jetbrains.com/ruby/2009/08/rubymine-for-vim-addi...

And here's the direct link to the plugin:

http://plugins.jetbrains.net/plugin/?ruby&id=164

I tend to go back and forth between vim and RubyMine. I like editing in vim, but when I want/need to use a debugger, I use RubyMine. RubyMine has a vim keymap (I believe they also have emacs), so editing within it is not so bad either.

I think I've adopted this since I went from an IDE -> vim instead of the opposite. Having a visual debugger was one of the features that kept me in an IDE (at least for Ruby). I just never felt like I was as productive without it.

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).

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.

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

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.

I recently switched from Aptana to RubyMine and it is really good. The only drawback is that in my experience it really needs a powerful workstation to give its best.

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

Yeah. It is. It's faster.

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.

Rubymine has a fairly decent VIM mode ( http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=164 ) but its a lot less snappy than MacVim.

I only use it (Rubymine) now and again though, for things like browsing through projects I don't work on often, or to help find syntax errors in code and so on.

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

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.

I'm a vim user. I'd use RM when pairing with someone not well versed in vim. Otherwise, I find it slow and difficult to work in.

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

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.

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.

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

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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