Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Rails w/ IntelliJ IDEA and BASH

After spending a lot of time w/ IDEs, I realize why I don't like VIM (nor eMacs, Less, More, Pico, Nano, etc). They're great, if you can memorize all of the shortcuts, keyboard tasks, and integration modules, as well as editing techniques, etc. But frankly, I have a very strong knowledge of IntelliJ, and people like John Lindquist show how to kick ass even better in an IDE than other systems.

My workflow with BASH lets me run my CI with Guard (using Zeus server), psql development (thanks Heroku!), and irb/rails c for any quick tests. However for autocompletion (because the Ruby and Rails frameworks are sooooo freakishly huge, that I'd never remember any of it, but I can also dive into any definition simply with ctrl + click, I'm learning much faster (even without the mustachio).

A few years ago I had a client switch me from Eclipse to IJ, and I haven't looked back. Rails is super easy to setup, but so is Python, and Scala, and Javascript. All of which rock to be able to switch back and forth on, even have multiple windows for different projects open, and multiple terminals running different servers, doing lots of different tests.

</rant>