

There are a few I read from time to time: Textmate Tips, Cool Textmate Tips, Textmate Tips from Macromates, Mactips, Textmate Productivity Tips. Then, you try reading most Textmate tips you can find on the Internet. It covers Rails related productivy tips and information, and will give you some new ways to develop. Be sure to go through most of the options of each one you install. With it, you can check and find new bundles. I started installing the GetBundles bundle: cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles My biggest advice would be to reserve some time to learning your tool. While Vim has a commanding lead in numbers, that is but one consideration.I was on the same boat some time ago.

I definitely appreciate the following features of vim: (It’s worth noting that Emacs users have responded to this claim, which is another reason to read it.)įinally, I would like to highlight another comment about someone’s preferred features in Vim: It makes you appreciate why VI is a modal editor.” (i.e.: previous insert, replace word, delete word, …). (dot) command, which repeats the previous operation. “IMHO, the single most useful feature of VI which Emacs does not have (AFAIK) is the. Complex to explain, but it’s surprisingly quick once you’re familiar with visual mode and :g/.Īnother contributor in that article compares some features with Emacs: This will execute the macro for each line in the visual block.

Then, append g/^/normal so the command line looks like: :'g/^/normal This presumes the macro you recorded was saved with the letter ‘b’.) Don’t yank the selection, though, instead press :, which will place you into command mode for the selected block (the command line looks like :', marking the start and end of the visual block). Now, visually select a block you want to perform the macro. Stephan Thorn comes in and says, “This is nice, but the idiom can be improved immensely using :g.”įor example, you’ve got a macro for changing the second word on a line to “foo” qb^wcwfooq (man, that looks weird to type). Now, you can repeat the macro for all the lines in the file, if you like. Recording this sequence into a macro called is done as mentioned previously. Using standard Vim commands, this can be expressed as: j^dwwhp Let’s say I want to create a macro that does the following: Go down one line and replace the first and the second word. The macro is invoked my typing that’s just when the fun starts.

q starts recording a macro, a second q terminates it. At first glance, this feature may not seem so special. Stephan Houban states that one of the features of Vim he loves is the macro feature. I will pick a couple of items from an article called Great Vim Features that consists of contributions from many Vim users to try and drive the point home. Islam Wazery penned Getting Started with Vim and Effective Rails Development with Vim, both worth reading if you are choosing the beaten path.īut, what is it that makes Vim so special? Well, the answer is “many, many things”. There’s no end to the articles about Vim on the web, including two very good ones here on SitePoint. Vim was written by Bram Moolenaar, and first released to the public in 1991. Regardless, Vim wins the Most Used Ruby Editor award for my sample set. I find it very interesting that two pillars of Ruby don’t use the most popular editor, surely something to consider when choosing your toolset. Matz prefers Emacs, while DHH uses the original version of TextMate. If you don’t know, Matz is the creator of Ruby as a language, and DHH is responsble for Ruby on Rails. I spoke to two of the most well-known Rubyists: Yukihiro Matusmoto (Matz) and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). Vim was, by far, the most preferred editor, being utilized by 50% of the interviewees. The interviews brought up the following editors (given in order of preference): My hope is that it will serve as a guide for newcomers to Ruby, or possibly even those already working with Ruby, on which editors are popular. If nothing else, this will show which editors are used by more Rubyists, with some data as to why. This short story, which likely applied to many Rubyists, inspired me to interview established Rubyists about their best Ruby editor. You recoil in fear….what if you make the wrong choice? “Use vim!” “Use Emacs!” “Use TextMate!” “Use Sublime Text!”. Holy smoke! There are a ton of editors, each with a community that swears by its features. OK, Google, find me the best Ruby editor. Go for it! As you enter the world of Ruby you realize, “I need an editor”. Well, you’ve decided to learn Ruby, have you? That’s great! Ruby is a wonderful language that aims to make programmers happy.
