Tim Bray has published the results of his nice survey about Ruby and Rails editors. In Bray’s piece we see that TextMate is the tool of choice for the Rails focused group, while Vi leads the way in terms of the Ruby one (albeit TextMate is very close):
One thing is clear, TextMate IS the editor of choice when it comes to the Ruby and Rails communities, and since it runs only on Mac, it is also obvious that Mac is the platform of choice too (this shouldn’t come as a surprise when you look at the sea of MacBook Pros at RailsConf). If we don’t consider the large group of people who use both Ruby and Rails, we could speculate that the Ruby community is more hackerish than the Rails one. While I believe this to be the case, I think that Vi coming out ahead of TextMate for Ruby, but not even close by a long shot for Rails, has more to do with the many useful features implemented by TextMate and the limited number of extra ones provided by Vi, when developing for the web with Rails.
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So should we start wars between Textmate and Vi users now, rather that between Vi and Emacs? 😉
We should. 😛
I think while this is interesting from an editor perspective, it obviously also speaks volumes about the hardware/OS platforms being used by developers in the Ruby and Rails space as well.
Right, I think that Vi/Emacs both also have useful editor features when building regular applications that just aren’t very useful in the web dev world too.
Web dev is a lot about repitition IME, and from what I’ve seen Textmate does make that really trivial.