RadRails vs. Textmate

Is there anyone out there can give me a comparison between RadRails/ Aptana and Textmate? I have been using skEdit for all of my general coding stuff, but I am now looking into getting a new editor for my Ruby/Rails work. I know that most Mac users swear by Textmate, but I would really like to hear some comparisons between RadRails, Textmate, and even skEdit as well.

What your thoughts and recommendations?

Cory

RadRails is an IDE (or was... at this point it's part of Aptana, which is an IDE). TextMate is a text editor with lots of support for software development. RadRails is built to understand Rails. TextMate does that through bundles. RadRails feels like Eclipse. TextMate feels like a Mac app. RadRails throws a lot of UI at you out of the gate, and it takes a while to learn it all. TextMate throws very little UI at you, and it takes a while to find the features hidden under the covers. RadRails is free. TextMate is free for 30 days.

-faisal

I've been looking for a good Rails IDE for a long time. I'm now using RadRails, but that doesn't qualify at all. Does Aptana support code completion like Eclipse can for Java, or if that's not possible, a little more basic like Borland Delphi? The problem is, that I have never seen any good code completion. When I type "render (:action =>" I want to be able to press ctrl-space, and see all the actions. Or when I type "<model>.", I want to see all the methods and attributes of that model. Can this all be done with Aptana?

I have used just about every editor/IDE for Mac and must say that I come back to TextMate every time. I have purchased Komodo and must say that it is great for Ruby stuff(amazing auto-complete) and find it a lot better than RadRails, but I still tend to use TextMate for everyday stuff. If you want a real powerful editor try Emacs with the Ruby/Rails packs installed and the zentest/autotest extensions, it makes for a great IDE/Editor. At the end of the day though, it is up to what you feel most comfortable with. I choose TextMate because I like it for Ruby work, I am a die hard Emacs man for Lisp.

I'm the wrong person to ask for details -- I've never found an IDE that seemed to help more than confound (and I was scarred by Pascal Genie in my youth -- mail me off list if you know what the heck I'm talking about there). That said, it does seem the Aptana people are moving the ball forward. You might also check out what the NetBeans team is doing with release 6.

-faisal

I never cared for command-line things made available in wizards. It's kind of like this feature in Kdevelop, which allows you to add a HTML tag through a dialog. I mean, I don't need a wizard for that... They only hinder me.

And, I don't use the generate script either, because I have to supply --omit-migration and delete the unit tests and fixtures anyway :slight_smile: And, the former isn't available in the wizard of radrails, so another reason not to use wizards...