RubyMine vs. Vim: my point of view

September 18, 2011

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This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on September 18, 2011.

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So, I tweeted a question earlier today about what editor is preferred by the rubyists and, although I didn’t get many answers, it, combined with a recent discussion I had about RubyMine vs. Vim later, helped me clear my reasoning a bit.

By my reading of Agile Web Development With Rails and some people I follow on twitter, it seems that all the cool geeks use Vim (or TextMate or Emacs) for Ruby and Ruby on Rails programming instead of any IDE.

I once googled to find out that vim was way complicated to set up. That same time, I found akitaonrails vimfiles on github. Fairly easy to set up if you just follow the instructions. But today I realized that there was this one thing that was failing for me: the Command-T extension. It was due to conflicts between the ruby version I am currently using (1.9.2) and the ruby version that comes bundled with Vim on Ubuntu (1.8.2).

Finally, I was decided to go with Vim completely. But after that, I had a discussion that made me consider about the advantages and disadvantages of both Vim and an IDE (RubyMine for this matter). Vim is lightweight, lightning fast, has all the cool keystrokes and gets very powerful when you install the appropriate plugins. But RubyMine is superior in refactoring support and also has the IdeaVIM plugin that, although buggy some times, is getting better with time and provides a sort of known environment for us vimmers.

So, that’s it. I’ll use Vim for my regular file editing and when I need to do a big refactoring, I’ll open up RubyMine.