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From: Michael Tomer on 8 Sep 2009 10:39
Aldric, I always liked Scite because it's so tiny. Netbeans (and other
IDEs like Microsoft Visual Studio, etc.) strike me as being far more
than I need. The only features I really want in a code editor are text
highlighting and soft-tabs. Regex for search/replace is also nice.

However, I'd like to make sure that I'm not writing off IDEs without
giving them a fair shake. What sorts of IDE features do you find useful
when working with Ruby?

Mason, if you're programming Ruby on Windows without problems, then all
the power to you. However, most of us have switched because it helps us
avoid serious configuration issues. For instance, installing Libxml on
Windows took me a few days of Google searches. Installing Libxml on
Linux took one command, and it was over in 10 seconds. The same is true
of virtually every library I've ever come across. I've probably lost
weeks of my life trying to figure out how to get various libraries
working in Windows. Linux is almost always painless.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an OS bigot. I use Windows, Linux and OSX on
a daily basis. However, when I develop, I do it on Linux/OSX. It saves
me a lot of pain.

Also, I work in a mainframe shop right now (We make banking software,
actually). I suspect that you're like a lot of my COBOL programming
co-workers in that you aren't really sure what open source software is
all about. For me, the most important thing is that I can fix any
problems I come across. When I'm on the mainframe and I run into a bug
in an IBM utility, I'm screwed. I can either try to get IBM to fix it,
which is probably never going to happen, or I can jump through hoops to
try to work around the bug.

If I'm working on a piece of open source software and I run into a bug,
I open the source code and fix it. When I'm done, I submit my changes to
the development team, and it usually gets rolled up into the main
version in a matter of hours. It's very liberating to squash the bugs
myself, rather than waiting for someone else to do it for me.
--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

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