via xkcd

I have been working in Ruby and Rails a couple weeks now, but I don’t know if I have been entirely happy with any of the editors/IDE that I have worked with. Coming from a Java background I used Eclipse/Spring Tool Suite for all my development work. I knew the short cuts, how to browse quickly and easily, and nothing with Ruby yet has felt like it has clicked.

I have spent the most time in VS Code right now, but I keep on finding features that I am yearning for. Like local code history, code templates, different views… I have been trying out RubyMine for the better part of a week, and it almost feels like too much going on. I haven’t gotten a good hold on customizing it, and for some reason when I try the hot keys, they never seem to work. I know I could change up the short-cuts, but that almost seems like cheating to me, it really isn’t learning the new IDE way of doing something but attempting it to be like something it isn’t.

The lead developer I have been pairing with this week is an emacs wizard. He makes it look effortless and insanely useful. I think I might have to give that a go, but if it is anything like Vim I know the learning curve will be steep. If I remember how to exit properly in Vim, it feels like a win. At home on my windows machine I’m just using powershell for a terminal and Atom for a editor. It’s super simple, and works great for the small coding exercises that I am doing, but would not work in an enterprise level application.