Moving to Ruby and Rails from .Net will be a challenge for any .Net developer and it’s not just because of the language. The challenge is in the tooling and workflow. At least that was what I thought; moving from Visual Studio to TextMate was a surprising, liberating and a welcome change.
Don’t get me wrong; I like VS2008 SP2. Didn’t you? VS2008 was fast, and for me, bug free after the third release. I don’t know what Microsoft does to VS when they release new versions but it’s too buggy and unstable. VS2010 RTM should have had more testing. Here are a few messages from the newly released software.
Visual Studio error messages did not get the designer and usability love that Microsoft has been spouting lately. Is catastrophic bad? It sounds bad. Should I shut down and restart? Did I lose something. Thanks Microsoft. Love it.
Well, if moving from VS to TextMate was liberating, what would it be like to move from VS to Vim? I imagined it to be like losing 100Lb of GUI in one workout session at the gym. The challenge for me when moving from TextMate to Vim was code navigation. TextMate, the current Rails editor of choice, has many bundles that extend the editor with navigation helpers. The bundles for Rails are great, with just a couple of key strokes and you are flying around the code.
What’s a developer to do when faced with a problem but to code or Google search. I searched and found a great Vim for rails developers screencast by Benjamin Orenstein.
The screencast covers
- The Fundamentals of Efficient Editing
- Mastering Rails.vim
- Using Snipmate
- The Power of Tags
- Why You Shouldn’t Use Grep
- Quick edits made quicker
The screencast is not an introduction to Vim. If you need an intro, check here, here and here. This screencast is from someone that uses Vim in anger. His experience comes through in the screencast telling you what you can do to be faster. You know, what truly matters to us developers. Benjamin covers many topics including plugins and techniques.
The screencast is delivered by downloading the zipped QuickTime movie. I really appreciate the download just in case I need to view it again when not connected to the Net. The video, audio and animations are high quality.
The screencast cost $9.00 and it is worth every penny. Vim for Rails Developers has helped me break my dependence on the traditional IDE. The advice and plugins have enabled me to replace my IDE with Vim. Now syntax is truly my Ui. Thanks Benjamin.
This is totally true. VS always takes over your CPU no matter what you spend on it. Or you need to reinstall often. That is why i really like create a base OS snapshot that i have VS installed and then i can just go back to that base install whenever something gets messed up. The snapshot that i am currently working works on files that are really on the host not the guest.