Ruby Ireland may the code rise to meet you

The Ruby Ireland shorts section is compiled from the recent community contributions. Feel free to add to it for next month and join in the Ruby Ireland community! You can discuss any points raised here on the Ruby Ireland Googlegroup.

Vim to the Max

Tony B notes:

I’ve been a long time TextMate user, but the lack of window splits and a terminal have always grated.  This week I had a little time to look at the state of the art for editors for Rails development. I looked at RubyMine (too slow), Emacs (too hard to setup and slow), Sublime (incomplete), Coda (not deep enough), and BBEdit (didn’t click with me). Finally, I revisited Vim (MacVim).  It seems to have a loyal following and after I spent the time going through the Vimtutor, I am now a convert. As an editor, Vim rocks. The power of the text navigation and manipulation alone were worth switching for, but add in Rails.vim and a ready made config from Carl and Yuhuda and you have everything needed for productive Rails development. I particularly enjoy the full screen mode for distraction free development. I’ve forked Janus to add include some other useful Vim plugins and to use what I believe to be a better set of snippets for Rails development. It also now uses a more familiar theme that TextMate will know and love. I was quite impressed with Redcar last time I looked at it. it’s come a long way and you can use textmate bundles… A shame Kod has stalled or is taking awhile to get the next release out, rather like the Chrome concept. Needs GoTo File and Project Search of TextMate for me to swap though.

Odds and Ends

Declan shares…

• A gotcha concerning Shams and Machinist 2 - Machinist 2 doesn’t use it any more!

• Good news for Netbeans users, JRuby is working on a deal to keep Rails support in Netbeans via a plugin

• Bundler installing gems into the wrong directory for you - this week I found out that the path parameter can (or lack of one) can land you in hot water

Anonymous says

• In case people are not already subscribed, Ruby Weekly is a pretty good newsletter that does a weekly roundup of Ruby happenings

• A recent Ruby Summer of Code project got merged into Rails edge which adds an Identity Map to ActiveRecord, I think this could make a huge difference to Rails performance (and help solve a lot of minor bugs people find in their Rails apps). Due for inclusion in Rails 3.1

Note: The RubyIreland Shorts is contributed by community members and does not reflect the views or opinions of the RubyIreland community or RubyIreland.com.