I spent half hour making this xml file so that my IntelliJ looks like a textmate color theme, which is cool. It’s meant just for Ruby, not for Java. And it’s no way to be perfect. But at least I hope this can provide a start point for further tuning.

I used Monaco font, which feel free to use your own. But the truth is: Monaco is probably the best monospace font.

Due to wordpress’s uploading policy, the file ends with a pdf, but it’s a xml file (colbalt.xml). You need to remove pdf part give it “xml” as the suffix. Enjoy

Textmate seems the “official” IDE for rails projects. But we have to develop under Windows, so no Textmate.

We used eclipse with radrails (Aptana) for a while, believe me, it’s not fun. Then we start to try IntelliJ now.

Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Space in IntelliJ gives you “word completion”, just like “Esc” in Textmate. And Ctrl+Space works for local variables nicely. And it even works for instance variables, but it needs long time to think. Ctrl+Space works partially in Eclipse, but not in a RSpec file where no explicit class declarations.

Global search on Textmate is a pain, especially if you forget to delete huge development.log and test.log. So I just grep extensively when on Macs. In IntelliJ, you can specify which directory to search with, this helps a lot. Even better, when you have to search the whole project, it will ask you if you want to skip development.log/test.log, very intelligent.

The amazing thing is that renaming classes name and methods name work perfectly in IntelliJ. This feature alone will save me countless time and energy.

Subversion support in Texmate is not so nice, I would just use terminal for subversion operations. In both Eclipse and IntelliJ, the supports are just awesome.

When you have conflicting files, the diff support in Textmate is primitive. And there is no good files/directories comparison tool under MacOS. Meld diff viewer is awesome, but it may take some effort to install it on Macs.

The biggest problem with IntelliJ is that it’s not very responsive, compared to Textmate. But it’s definitely faster than Eclipse.

We use Watir as our scenario test tool, so moving away from Windows doesn’t seem quite possible. This being said, it seems IntelliJ is our best bet.

I used TextMate at work. It’s as good as you can get, but it’s only for Mac OS which I don’t have at home. Today I tried rails.vim for gvim on my newly installed Ubuntu. Again, it proves that vim is a forever favorite. Mastering all key bindings with the rails script may take time, but I can smell it’s worth it.

Another IDE I tried was RadRails, for some reason, on my Ubuntu box, it was super slow and it sounds funny to have a RoR IDE written in Java anyway.