I am Pedantic.

Rubymine is Slow

So the Java guys over at JetBrains wrote a “Ruby on Rails IDE” called Rubymine. It promises to increase your productivity, catch your errors and make you breakfast. But note what is not mentioned: speed.

Not once on the Rubymine page is anything mentioned about “speed”, “fast”, “quick”, “rapid”, etc. Why?

Because Rubymine is slow. Really slow.

Obviously we all have different values, and my bias in this case should be obvious: I need speed. I absolutely refuse to use a text/programming editor that is not absolutely blazingly fast. All of the traditional big hitters fulfill this requirement: Vim, Emacs, TextMate, BBEdit, UltraEdit, etc. They’re all very fast when it comes to editing code.

Using Rubymine, on the other hand, is like being shot in the ass with a tranquilizer dart. Everything is lethargic and heavy. I allow that some people are OK working while drunk, exhausted or tranquilized, but I’m not one of them. I will continue to write great code at lightning-quick pace with TextMate and any number of hand-crafted scripts that give me the productivity I crave.