Will using an IDE with Rails hinder me?

Question

I\'m new to Ruby on Rails and so far, I\'m having a lot of fun learning it. Coming from the .NET world, it\'s been quite a switch as my IDE (Visual Studio 2008) sort of hand

Answer 1

When I learned on Ubuntu, I used gedit. I tried to make it like TextMate using different add-ons.

I liked having to use the terminal while I was learning as it helps you to understand all the aspects of the build process. Using a heavy-duty IDE like RubyMine or Eclipse might hide all that and therefore limit your understanding of what is going on "under the covers". Usually this lack of knowledge will pose problems as you get into developing more complex applications.

In my opinion, SVN support is sort of unnecessary in an IDE. It's pretty easy just to open up the terminal to manage your repository, or to use some GUI tool like Tortoise.

I think the only real benefit to using an IDE like RubyMine would be the auto/code-completion functionality. I too am a big fan of ReSharper (used it for C# development) and I would have loved to have some tool like it when I was learning Rails- but doesn't TextMate have support for auto/code-completion?

I would say don't jump into using and RubyMine for at least several months, or even a year, if ever. The extra work that you have to do will pay off in the long run. Stick with TextMate.