On Jan 15, 2012, at 12:45 PM, Mathew S. wrote:
Isn’t that more work though? if I could open it up in the text editor
with the rails stuff that pops up wouldn’t that be a bit easier?
Part of the challenge/reward for a Rails developer is learning the
mental model that goes with the framework. It helps you to attack new
problems using the tools that the framework provides. Using an IDE makes
it very easy to do the (relatively few) things that the IDE developers
have given you to work with, and nearly impossible to discover anything
outside of those boundaries.
Working directly with the code and the terminal gives you a hands-on
appreciation for what you are doing. Looking up the correct approach in
Rails Guides or another documentation source will return answers that
presume that you will be typing commands into terminal or writing code
directly into your text editor.
Virtually none of the answers you will find on this list or on the Web
will tell you which menu structure to look through in your IDE to find
the command to accomplish your goals, and you’ll be on your own trying
to reverse-engineer what is actually a definitive and accurate answer to
your question in order to slot it into your IDE’s world-view.
If you’re stuck on Windows, choose a text editor that supports viewing
an entire tree of files. On the PC, the closest I have seen to TextMate
is UltraEdit (I don’t make it over to the distaff side all that much, so
there’s probably something newer and better these days.) Also be sure
that your editor supports context-specific code highlighting, so you can
spot errors like mis-matched quotation marks and braces without having
to run the code.
Many, if not most Rails devs use TextMate*, Terminal, and a browser to
do their work. Many, if not most Rails devs are highly productive with
this combination of tools. There have been several attempts to build (or
adapt) a Rails IDE, yet none of them have found traction in the
marketplace to the extent that they have supplanted the established
workflow. I’m not saying that this is universally true, or will always
be true, but it takes a qualitative difference on the order of DOS vs.
Mac to disrupt an established workflow, and until such a disruptive
force arrives, and drags the entire ecosystem along with it (kicking and
screaming and decrying the newcomer as a “toy”) you’re probably going to
be relatively on your own.
Walter
- Or the local equivalent.