Top 5 mac tools for web development

Posted by ochronus on Feb 14, 2010 in tools | 3 comments

Let me show you my ‘must-have’ list for development-related tools on Mac.

1. MacPorts

MacPorts is an essential tool for any serious developer. It’s very similar to the ports system of FreeBSD with a little mixin from gentoo’s portage, though it’s a lot simpler than any of those.

It is a source-based package manager with many useful packages like ‘lighttpd’, ‘memcached’ or ‘mongodb’. It will always have the latest ruby or php while the default installed ones will likely age on a default OS X install.

Need an extra package installed and kept up to date? Need dependencies auto-resolved? MacPorts is the answer.

2. TextMate

I don’t think I really need to introduce TextMate to Mac developers. It’s the swiss-army knife of editors with a very convenient user interface. It knows your dev. language, xml or markdown/textile format. It can be extended with add-ons. You can generate valid XHTML document skeletons with a single key combination. It has tab-completion for common structures like ruby/php/etc. class and control structures. It auto-closes parentheses and string delimiters for you. It has code and document folding. It runs your unit tests. It knows about your version control system. It is almost a full-fledged IDE with a huge speed difference – but it does not do cross-file references unfortunately. Probably the word I’m missing here is ‘yet’.

3. Coda

Coda is a nice html/css/php/ruby editor with a very strong remote file support, for me it shines in one thing TextMate does really miss: remote editing. In Coda you edit remote files over ftp/ssh/whatever as if they were local ones. It has a nice syntax highlight, snippet support and built-in documentation for some languages. Also subversion integration is nice, though it’s available only for local files.

4. RubyMine IDE

Oh, the newest kid on the block of rails IDEs. If I had to describe it in one word it would be the word “Complete”. TextMate has nice (very-very slick and cool) rails support, NetBeans does manage rake and migrations, has cross-file referencing, but RubyMine integrates everything so nicely that there’s no question who’s king of the hill here. Oh, did I forget to mention tests? Yes, it speaks cucumber. Yes it speaks rspec and shoulda. It has completions for user stories and haml (niiiice). It boasts on-the-fly code analysis and type inference with warnings in the editor window. It has full debugger support. It has a fairly complete git plugin, one that’s still missing from the free alternative NetBeans.

5. NetBeans IDE

An old friend of mine, a long time winner of the “Eclipse” vs. “NetBeans” war in my head. Nice interface, supports many languages and is fairly complete. Not much to say, it has everything one can expect from an IDE. It beats RubyMine and IntelliJ Idea with it’s exceptional PHP support (well, RubyMine is a rails/ruby-only ide, but Idea is a generic one). It’s developed actively and in a professional manner (I rarely had any problems with nightly builds ever), it has a strong user base. A joker of IDEs, just like Eclipse.

I’d be glad to hear about your favorite tools of the trade, please drop a few lines below in the comment box if you have the time.

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