TextMate for rails

Note: The RichText blog has moved to www.ricroberts.com

With the seemingly indefinite postponement of Radrails 0.8, I decided to go on the hunt for another Ruby on Rails IDE.

After scouring the web, I found that many people seem to favour TextMate, and according to this page the core Rails team use it for development, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

I must say I am impressed. It features Subversion integration, and some built in support for developing Ruby on Rails applications. The only thing it doesn't have is a step-through ruby debugger, but there is a TextMate ruby-debug bundle which allows you to set breakpoints from within TextMate. (My previous blog post explains more about ruby-debug.)

Note that in order to get the Subversion integration to work, you need a Subversion client installed. There are now new instructions on Hivelogic.com for setting up rails on OS X which now feature how to install one.

TextMate is not free, but it is cheap at only 39 Euros.