I’m not a closet fan of JetBrain’s products. ReSharper is a dream and I can’t imagine hate coding anything without it. Recently, I’ve been using the RubyMine Beta as JavaScript editor. I’ve really liked it, and it far exceeds Visual Studio with only the fact it doesn’t keep shifting my JavaScript around while it auto indents, un-indents, then re-indents. It does many more things better than Visual Studio, but this was the madding factor that made me search for something new.

The more I use it for JavaScript, the more I find myself editing other file types in RM as well. Most recently, I was working in one of our Stylesheets and found it’s UI for editing colors far exceeded the VS equivalent. Let’s take the following example. Let’s say I want to edit the following CSS class.

.note-type-Glitch-Active{
    background-color:#D3262E;
    color:White;
}

VS will let me right click inside the class, and click “Build Style”. I get a nice dialog window to edit the style.

Nice huh? There are lots of switch to flip and buttons to click. My complaint is you took me from something succinct, and cluttered it with a bunch of options I don’t care about. Do I really need to click a checkbox to make it blink? I clicked on “background-color”, chances are I want to edit that.

OK, I’m being picky, but I really do want to change the background color. So, I click Background, and then swatch color, and then the custom dialog, because how often do you pick from their swatch pallet?

I finally end up here.

What glorious color picker dialog? I swear this thing hasn’t changed since Windows 3.1. It is really pitiful. I’ve complained about this color picker before, but I don’t mind doing it again. I can’t make slider adjustments to the RGB values individually. I can’t adjust saturation via a slider, and go ahead and try to make use of that customer colors palette. It is near impossible. Yuck!.

You can make your change, OK all the way out and you’ve got your new color.

Now let’s look at RubyMine.

Hey! Is that a swatch right there in the editor? That’s pretty nice. Single click it and we get a nice picker.

It still starts out with a swatch palette, but the preview is pretty nice. Also, the recent color palette is much easier to use.. Click over to HSB.

Hue, saturation and luminance adjustments via a slider! Nice! Naturally the RGB gives you exactly what you would expect: RGB adjustments for each component via sliders.

I click once and I’m out of the dialog with the new color.

In my opinion, this is a much more usable color picker. I’m sure I’ll be back with more things RubyMine does better than Visual Studio.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Visual Studio, but there are something other tools do better.