Chad Woolley over at pivotal has a blog entry about The Great Ruby IDE Smackdown of ’09. He compares the IDE’s by doing a task that no Rails developer will ever need to do. What do we really do all day: Model, View, Controller, Test, routes, etc. The IDE should provide an easy way to switch between these. Netbeans does this. Aptana does this. RudyMine does this. They are all functional and when used properly, very effecient. What really matter to me? VI intergration. Netbeans has this with jVi. I love it.

I got a kick out of this:

“To me, the benefits of a memory- and processor-sucking IDE with tons of unnecessary, unconfigurable, resource-eating tiny-ass-fonts and chrome did not justify giving up the speed and responsiveness of a great text editor.”

Memory- and processor-sucking IDE? Is he running a 486dx? Are Macs really that slow? Dude, switch to linux! Or, here’s 10 Reasons You Should Not Switch To Linux.

Here’s another nice feature of NetBeans that your Text Editor won’t do. Notice on line 127, I have a mispelling of the word worksheet. Netbeans bolds the misspelled varialbe to tell me that I have a variable here that has never been used before. This is very helpful.