What is Rubymine?

So, you want to know how Rubymine can help you with coding? Guess what, me too! Let’s do this together.

What is Rubymine?

First off, Rubymine is an integrated development environment (IDE) for Ruby and Rails. This means that when you’re coding, it helps you to avoid extra typing and navigate through your code quicker. For example, remember those times when you forget to close your brackets or quotes. Not to worry! Rubymine has that sorted for you! It will highlight potential errors and format your code for you, along with a host of other smart things.

How do I install it?

Follow the installation instructions here for macOS, Linux and Windows. They have a 30 day free trial, so you can use that before committing to buy it.

Open a project

This tutorial runs you through opening your first Ruby project using RubyMine. Here is a 1 minute video demonstrating this too. They also have a tutorial to create your first Rails project.

I am a code newbie, so incurred a few stumbling blocks whilst running through the tutorials. After doing the usual googling around for solutions, I sought help from a colleague before I was able to complete them. Nevertheless, they‘re still a great place to start for learning this tool.

Navigation

I found it useful to run through the tutorials above to learn how to navigate RubyMine’s user interface, but if you’re interested in a specific article to help you get started with this, check out this one here.

Shortcut keys

Everyone loves a good shortcut. Not only are they helpful, they also make you look cool. Wizard style.

JetBrains (the people who made RubyMine) has detailed the 10 most important shortcut keys that will help us. Check it out here.

Once we’ve mastered these, here is a helpful article on more shortcuts that will make us true pros!

Finally, here’s a list of all their shortcuts for mac and windows/linux, which you could bookmark for future use.

The Verdict

As a code newbie, I found RubyMine quite complicated. Having used Visual Studio Code, Atom and Sublime, I was surprised at how counter intuitive RubyMine was and the lack of helpful YouTube videos (my go-to for learning anything) didn’t help. Having said this, RubyMine has assured us (thanks Artem!) that more YouTube videos are on the way. I’ll definitely be looking out for videos targeted at complete beginners!

Colleagues have advised me that RubyMine is useful when using Ruby on Rails, so I look forward to trying it again in the future once I’ve got my code groove going.