RubyMine 4 is Here to Make You Feel the Productivity

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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:<p>* 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)<p>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.

UPDATE: So I contacted the folks at JetBrains just to see what they'd say, and they pushed me through on the free upgrade!<p>Oh man.<p>&#62; "Licensed Version: 3.0 and any new product release which is made generally available before 1 February 2012"<p>I missed the free upgrade by 14 days :( Oh well.<p>Congrats on the release, JetBrains!

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.<p>Glad I checked HN this morning, going to give the 30-day demo a try.<p>(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)

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?

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.

I want to like it, because I know I could improve my workflow quite a bit.<p>However, IMHO:<p>- the strict dependency on Sun's JRE instead of OpenJDK was the first annoyance (I'm on Debian).<p>- 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.<p>- my goodness it's slow!<p>- non-native UI is another turn-off - crappy file selectors, plain ugly...<p>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).<p>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.<p>Now I'm screwed.<p>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.<p>My scenario, Ubuntu 11.10, i7, 8gb ram.<p>YMMV, but I'd wait if I were you.<p>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.<p><i></i> Update <i></i><p>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.<p>edit this file to do the same: RM_path/bin/rubymine64.vmoptions<p>I went with these for settings:<p>-Xms512m -Xmx4096m -XX:MaxPermSize=700m -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=128m -ea

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<p><a href="http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/RUBY-10478?projectKey=RUBY#tab=Comments" rel="nofollow">http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/RUBY-10478?projectKey=RU...</a>

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.

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)<p>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.

Has anyone moved from a vim workflow to a tool like this and stuck with it?<p>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.

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

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

Can someone who is at least 'intermediate' in vim give me a reason as why a vim guy would switch?<p>I'm saying this as someone who feels the need to use a debugger maybe once every 3 or 4 months.

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

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.

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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