Why TextMate and not Netbeans or other IDEs on the Mac? [closed]

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Netbeans was my choice for Rails development in Windows and Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora). Now I am using a Mac. I had heard good things about TextMate, but now that I have got a change to use it I don't think it is a better alternative to what I was using. Or am I missing something here?

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TextMate has traditionally been preferred on the Mac because it's what the Rails core team themselves used and DHH even helped Allan Odgaard with some of the early TextMate development work. In the early days of Rails there was an argument to be made that pure text editors such as TextMate were preferred over heavyweight full-blown IDEs, because the dynamic nature of Ruby meant that IDEs weren't able to offer the full range of benefits (such as code completion) as they can for languages such as Java. Several years later and with advancements in IDE technology for dynamic languages, that's not really the case any more.

The bottom line is that you don't have to use TextMate for Rails development on a Mac. It doesn't even have a monopoly amongst the Rails core team any more, as some of them use Vim (for example). You should use what works for you.

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I too had been using Netbeans for my rails development - nothing stopping you from continuing using it though. Netbeans support is still good on OSX (although Oracle stopping support for the rails development plugin will eventually cause you a bit of a problem).

I wouldn't say TextMate is the only option though, after asking around with my local rails developers - I found that rubymine was actually pretty popular. I tried it out, and have been really happy with it so far, and I had no problems switching over from Netbeans... Although I still am learning all the shortcuts.

As John Topley already mentioned - use what works for you.