Ruby-editors

[Fenrir2]

Can someone explain what the differences between emacs and textmate are? Textmate seems a little more GUI oriented, but lots of things can be done with keyboard shortcuts.

I've heard that textmate keycombos are more intelligent. If you press Ctrl+I, textmate will insert a class, unless your cursor is in a class, then it will insert a method, unless it is in a method, when it will insert an if-statement.

Emacs isn't that clever, but you can do good things with abbrev and snippets. (you type par and then tab, and emacs expands it to params[:id], or liai, and it becomes link_to "text", :action => "action", :id => id, and you can step through the parameters with tab. Does textmate have this too?

Does textmate have rails specific things like a rails console (script/console), or an sql console? Does it have an integrated shell, or do you have to use an external shell? Does it have functions for jumping from view to controller (for example, if you are in app/views/a_contr/act.rhtml, you can jump to the action in the controller AContr#act.). Can you run webrick in the background? Does it have rake unittest integration? Ri integration?

Thanks.

[kyko]

Fenrir2: TextMate is built for Mac and the Cocoa GUI. Emacs was not and can tend to be buggy on Mac. In fact, it is difficult in many cases to get emacs working properly in gui mode on mac. Personally, I've tried a few emacs binary packages for mac os x and the cocoa gui but with little luck except with Aquamac Emacs (and when I tried that, the keyboard shortcuts never worked). As as side note, I don't mind editing in Terminal but I find I'm usually more productive with an intuitive interface than command line editors. I use emacs sometimes when I'm working in linux but I usually find other editors have more of the features and ease of use I need. So the big diff here is ease of use.

Besides just general ease of use, I really enjoy TextMate's smart tabs feature colapsing blocks of code, etc. Like emacs, TextMate has liai+tab feature but the par+tab shortcut changes it to partition { |e| } instead of params[:id].
TextMate does not however have consoles for rails or sql or intigrated shells and I don't know of anyway to jump to a controller that way with TextMate. However TextMate does have a very gracefull approach for switching between files especially if you are working in a project with multiple tabs.
WebBrick (or any other program run in the command line) will not interfere with TextMate. TextMate is not an IDE, it is just a very usefull text editor. You should try it out for the 30 day trial so you know what it is about.

[DougBTX]

Can someone explain what the differences between emacs and textmate are?

The biggest thing I miss in Emacs is the "project" view. From the terminal, when you are inside your Rails folder (or any), you can do mate . to create an ad-hoc project. The closest I've found for emacs is http://cedet.sourceforge.net/speedbar.shtml though I found it too clunky to use long term.

Being able to see a list of all your files and folders, especially with a Rails app's default layout, is very handy. I find myself clicking in and out of folders much more in emacs, in TextMate you can just expand a folder toview the contents, without having to hide the other half of your files. It also updates automatically, rather than having to refresh it manually ala emacs.

Generally I find TextMate more friendly than emacs. For example, if you open a file in emacs, it reopens the file, regardless of whether it is already open. TextMate just brings the currently open file to the foreground as you'd expect.

The other constant niggle I have in emacs is the syntax highlighting (or as it calls it, "Global Font Lock" - that's another niggle, everything seems to have archaic names) with mmm-mode. It bugs me when you've got to manually refresh the colours, or it doesn't pick up that some code is JavaScript not HTML, or it takes 5 seconds for it to realise I've closed a multiline comment, or it thinks that this or that end double quote might as well be black. Perhaps mmm-mode isn't set up properly, I'm surprised an editor with so much praise doesn't support it out of the box.

Hmm, I should probably put something positive in here about emacs so I don't come off too one-sided.

Douglas

[DougBTX]

Does textmate have rails specific things like a rails console (script/console), or an sql console?

I just use Terminal.app for that, it does a great job.

Does it have an integrated shell, or do you have to use an external shell?

I just use Terminal.app for that, it does a great job.

Does it have functions for jumping from view to controller (for example, if you are in app/views/a_contr/act.rhtml, you can jump to the action in the controller AContr#act.).

I think this is heading in the direction you're after, though I've not tried it:

http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2006/02/...n-in-textmate/

Can you run webrick in the background?

I just use Terminal.app for that, it does a great job.

Does it have rake unittest integration?

Yep: video text.

Ri integration?

^H is what you're after.

That's one of the great things about the TextMate+Rails community, there are plenty of people working out the kinks and shouting about it.

Douglas

[Nick Carlson]

I'd probably use TextMate if I was on a mac. But since I'm on windows, editPlus2 seems to be best.

[Galo]

Because it's not as good as other available editors.

this is merly your opinion, it's a fine editor imho but ok

[Fenrir2]

Cool, I really would like to try textmate, but I don't own a mac (yet).

[letsjoy]

RadRails is cool

[alistair_b]

Im using radrails. its a very annoying when some pages don't open. But I don't really have time to go around finding a better alternatice right now.

[Fenrir2]

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SharpenTheSaw

[b0rdslide]

I'm also using RadRails. Tried other editors but I really needed the full project-centric IDE of RadRails.

Right now the only annoyance is the inability to open a few rhtml files with code highlighting.

[Sojan80]

Cool, I really would like to try textmate, but I don't own a mac (yet).

Is Textmate a good text editor for the mac? Does it offer syntax highlighting? I love syntaxt highlighting.... and being able to set my own tab indents is cool too, but as I just got a Mac I have no clue what software to get to replace my PC equivalents...

[beley]

Is Textmate a good text editor for the mac? Does it offer syntax highlighting? I love syntaxt highlighting.... and being able to set my own tab indents is cool too, but as I just got a Mac I have no clue what software to get to replace my PC equivalents...

Yes, TextMate has syntax highliting - go download the trial and see for yourslf. Personally, I think it's the best editor I've ever used.

http://macromates.com/

[redbone]

I mainly program Perl and occasionally PHP, and I really like Activestate's Komodo. It has Ruby support, and I'm interested to hear from Ruby programmers who've used Komodo

[dnszero]

RadRails is getting pretty good these days. It's my free editor of choice currently (works on Windows and Mac, dunno about linux).

I really liked Textmate but it's way overpriced, imho. Komodo was very nice, too and for $30, it's not too bad. But neither of them really had enough features worth the price to me versus the free alternatives.

[rossriley]

Does textmate have rails specific things like a rails console (script/console), or an sql console?

Ctrl + Shift + |

will bring up a rails generate menu in textmate you can generate a Scaffold, Model, Contoller, Mailer, Migration or Plugin

[Fenrir2]

Cool. I really want them to port it to linux.