Vim or Emacs for Rails development... any advantages? [closed]

Question

Getting ready to try out vim or emacs for rails development. Does one of these support rails development any better than the other? This is on windows if that matters.

Edit

I'm not looking for reasons why or why not to use vim or emacs and I don't want opinions on which is a better editor. I mainly just want to know if one or the other has more/better tools or plugins for using rails, or are they about the same?

Answer 1

Emacs is quite good with Rails when you include the rinari minor mode, and ruby-electric-mode (which comes with the Rails source) is also nice -- more here. That said, it is a bit of a struggle to set up and the learning curve is steep.

Answer 2

Recently (few months ago) I've switched from RubyMine (around €90) to VIM (exactly €0) and I'm really happy with that.

It's not easy to describe why it's better but one thing I love about VIM is that I don't need mouse anymore. It probably sounds funny but I feel much happier without a mouse - because it frees me from the table.

In VIM you'll find helluva lot of nice features - just google around. For example one of the best is ci" which will delete all text inside " and you can start writing. But there are many many others.

The full blown IDE's are IMHO useless for Ruby and other dynamic languages. Their best features like: refactoring, code completition, syntax checking, etc. simply doesn't work. Or worst - works on 80% percent. And they will never work as Rails are full of eval(some_text_that_generates_methods)

I can't speak for Emacs as I've never used it.

I'm not sure how is it on Windows platform as I'm on Mac/Linux. But it should be similar.

UPDATE: Ah, I forgot to provide a link to nice VIM setup for Ruby on Rails: http://github.com/akitaonrails/vimfiles

If you follow the README you will have a working environment ready in a minute. There are many useful plugins in this repository (git submodules to be exact) - just take a look inside.