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Comment by jshen | Hacker News Reader

IDEs have a high cost (learning curve, complexity, etc) that is not worth the benefit for dynamic languages.

I'm not sure what the gaping hole is the op is talking about. Textmate is an awesome editor and it doesn't matter that there hasn't been an update in a while.

The only thing I really miss with text mate is good git integration.

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Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind about TextMate; it does just what a bunch of people want it to. That's awesome! I used it for quite a while. Heck, I still use it for simple editing.

Personally, once I tried an IDE with integrated context sensitive help, inline syntax checking, real indenting, etc. TextMate didn't seem to solve the problems that I needed it to solve. It just became a fancy notepad app with some extra macros.

I'm not trying to put anyone's choice down. If TextMate works for you, then great! I'm very happy that you've found the right editor for you; however, the point of my post was that there are many other choices out there that confine the usefulness of TextMate to a very specific audience.

And personally, I feel like the cost/learning curve arguments are not really valid. Eclipse and NetBeans cost nothing. And ultimately, I found that getting what I needed out of NetBeans was much more intuitive than getting what I needed out of TextMate.

i use netbeans a lot for java, and I've tried a few times to use it for ruby but it doesn't do much more than textmate for ruby. For that little bit extra it uses between 1-2 gigs of ram (instead of 50 megs), requires more setup and maintenance, you can't just drop a ruby folder on it and go, etc. All of the auto completion, real time docs, etc are flaky as hell with a language like ruby. It really has no idea what methods exist on an object, or what class an object is. And heaven forbid I want to open something crazy like a bash script in netbeans.

Also, and I've never understood why this is, plugins seem to be much more fragile on the big IDEs than the editors like emacs, vim, and textmate. You'd think they'd break less with all the static typing of java, but in my experience I've had far more problems with them.

I do love the git integration though. That's the one thing I really wish textmate or emacs had.

Emacs has git integration, have a look on emacs wiki

I've tried most of them and they didn't really do what I wanted. I don't want to do all my git commands from my editor, but I want my editor to visualize important stuff for the files I'm looking at. In netbeans the gutter of the open file is color coded to show how the code your looking at is different from HEAD (or whatever).

You could probably get emacs to do that without major trouble. That's the beauty of it: you can make it do what you want, which is something you always end up wanting, because nothing behaves exactly like you think it ought to.

"You could probably get emacs to do that without major trouble."

Hehe, this is true and it's why I am an emacs user, but "without major trouble" means spending 30-50 hours of my life developing it from scratch. That's rather hard when one has a demanding job and two kids under 3 at home.

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