As part of my new job at Pivotal Labs I’ve been pair programming almost every day. The obvious challenge with pair programming, especially in a popular language like ruby, is in choosing what tools to work with. Vim, Emacs, RubyMine, TextMate, the choices are various and divisive.
To make peace among the engineers, it makes sense to dictate one set of tools to make peace among all your employees, and to make provisioning the machines easier. Pivotal has decided to standardize on RubyMine with a dark color scheme and a few custom configurations.
The Good
RubyMine, being set up for ruby in particular, works very well with navigating, indenting, and colorizing ruby code. With the exception of setting a variable as the result of an if expression, I have never seen RubyMine indent code incorrectly or get confused on coloration.
It also does a decent job of navigating to ruby classes and functions, something that is quite hard since ruby lacks explicit import semantics. It definitely makes hunting down odd test harness functions down a breeze, and has saved me in the past. It also is good at identifying the view that cooresponds to a controller method, but due to the way that tracker is laid out, I haven’t had a chance to use this feature often.
And as the cherry on top RubyMine includes a “Textmate like” quick find feature. In large code bases this will save you about a minute trying to find a particular file, so ling as you have an idea of what it’s called!
The Bad
If you only have unique controllers and models, you will absolutely love the ability to jump to a class definition. Since we use a lot of similarly named controllers inside namespaces to control API versions, it often gets confused about what version I want. The quick find feature sometimes ignores the path if you provide it, which makes copying files from stacktraces occasionally unreliable.
Javascript and less support is mediocre. No real complaints, but nothing to set it apart from other environments in my opinion. Maybe my colleagues who work on the front end would have a more nuanced opinion.
Also sometimes with large files the coloring or error checking can lag behind. This usually kicks in at files longer than 3000 lines, which is not unusual for test files. For the most part this is just an annoyance which doesn’t affect editing in any serious way.
It has git integration, which lags behind the offerings from Emacs, Vim, and Eclipse in my opinion. I end up using the command line instead of the built in tools.
The Ugly
RubyMine is incredibly dim witted when it comes to parenthesis and quotes. If you wish to put an escaped quote at the end of a string, RubyMine will let you escape your ending quote, then insert a matching pair right afterwords when you try and fix the mistake! To add insult to injury, you must move the cursor before fixing the issue lest RubyMine delete both of the extra quotes. Very frustrating.
RubyMine is also one of the most memory consuming programs I use. At least once a week it will grind my machine to a halt due to memory usage, which is impressive on a machine with 16G in memory.
Conclusions
Out of the box, RubyMine works very well. I think it is a good compromise for large teams. But if you have time to learn some more complicated tools, I believe you would be way better off learning a more customizable editor like Emacs or Vim. It might take some effort, but these editors can do just as much as their commercial cousins and will continue to do well no matter what language you decide to use in the future.