TextMate and Ruby

I'm an on and off [tag]Ruby[/tag] developer, and recently I've been trying to decide whether I should use Eclipse for Ruby development or whether TextMate (I am on a Mac) is better.

Why even think of [tag]Eclipse[/tag]? Simply that I know it well and it's very rich for developing Java. It's also cross platform. From my investigation though, Ruby support in Eclipse is still immature.

On Mac, TextMate is the hero of Ruby developers. But given that Ruby doesn't have a debugger and nirvana to Ruby developers is the interactive ruby shell, IRB, I'm not convinced yet.

• Here's a good article on maximizing TextMate for Ruby: "Exploring TextMate … a Ruby Perspective."

• The book "TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac" is excellent, and written by James Edward Gray II, one of the TextMate developers who is also a ruby guy.

• Here's another article by the same author about Customizing TextMate.