RubyMine is now free for non-commercial use

[phendrenad2]

It's been a long time since I last used RubyMine, but I always felt that it was the weakest of the JetBrains tools. And not because JetBrains didn't try hard enough, but because Ruby just doesn't offer a lot of opportunities for an IDE to take advantage of.

I ended up cancelling my subscription over some trivial thing (I think it was the fact that I couldn't quite get the IDE to preserve the indentation of a file. It was an all-or-nothing global setting, but I work on codebases that might have a 4-space indent HTML file and a 2-space indent HTML File in the same directory, and the IDE was ignoring the current style of the file and using whatever indent level I had configured).

[onionisafruit]

It might be the weakest of the jetbrains IDEs[0], but for a long time it was simultaneously the best Ruby IDE for my needs. It had reliable jump to definition when nobody else did. That was key for me circa 2015 when I was coming from Java and struggling with my first dynamically typed language since Perl. There are probably better Ruby editors out there now. I stick with RubyMine because I use jetbrains for other languages and like the consistency.

[0] I won’t say the weakest of their tools because youtrack exists.

[ryandv]

In general it's impossible to "find usages" or "go to definition" when the language not only fails to equip IDEs and tooling with the static typing information that would grant definitive answers to such questions; but even goes further and allows methods to be redefined or even synthesized and defined, for the first time, at runtime, with no corresponding source location or file. Method lookup and dispatch are fully Turing complete (you can `#send` anything, including fully dynamic method names, and respond to any message with arbitrary logic in `#method_missing`), and you can even redraw the method lookup chain and inheritance hierarchies at runtime (includes, mixins, module prepend, eigenclasses et al).

This is not a failing of JetBrains tooling but rather a pervasive language smell and consequence of Ruby philosophy.

[cosmic_cheese]

Yeah, Ruby wasn’t unpleasant to write in the wonderfully simple TextMate back in the day… a full fat IDE feels like extreme overkill.

I might even say that’s a point of attraction for the language. Overwrought IDEs and heavy editors are more optional relative to some languages.

[TheAceOfHearts]

It's been a really long time since I last used RubyMine as well, but one of my complaints back then was that it didn't help much when trying to debug code that made heavy use of metaprogramming. Maybe capabilities have improved since then. Despite that limitation, RubyMine still provided a far better debugging experience than what could be achieved through the default ruby debugging tools.

[lagniappe]

>Free for non commercial use

I like to recreationally overthink sometimes:

Most of us code in hopes that the thing we make is cool and useful, and it's a good thing if the thing we make catches on and becomes popular. Some might even say if they could make a living off their creation, they'd love that.

Given that this site is what it is, -most- of us have financial ambitions, with code as the means to an end to get us that money.

Back to the free for non commercial use stipulation, I'm just wondering how practical is this model? Is it expected that people do periodic reviews of the success of their projects and make some sort of subjective judgement when they should pay for a license?

Is there room for some other business model to more viably compete with vscode and vscode-forks that are free, while still creating paychecks for JetBrains?

[thrtythreeforty]

I treat the spirit of these licenses as: "if you have reasonable expectation of making money from your use of it, please buy a license. Otherwise, we appreciate the mindshare."

Practically speaking, the license is probably much closer to "if you are making prodigious amounts of money, and you are using our software, then you had better buy a license to avoid a legal situation."

[cyrialize]

I'm a huge fan of RubyMine (and all of JetBrains tooling).

I've always found their find by reference and jump to definition better than using a language server.

[CiTyBear]

> It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics.

Important indeed. This is not "free as in freedom"

[privatelypublic]

It never would be. It's free as in beer.

Also, mark my words: Most/All Jetbrains IDEs are going to go this way. They're just pacing it to keep good press rolling.

[nomilk]

This is awesome. Over the past four years I went from Sublime Text, to VS Code, to a 'dual IDE' setup (neovim and cursor).

I hear rubymine has the best support for documentation and source code lookup capabilities (vitally important).

Curious of its AI capabilities; how much of a step down would it be going from cursor to rubymine? I guess it could be used stand-alone purely for its documentation/source capabilities, but 3 IDEs feels like overkill.

[onionisafruit]

It’s a bit of a step down from cursor and vscode in terms of AI integration, but I still prefer my jetbrains ides (goland and rubymine). GitHub broke most aspects of their extension for jetbrains last week and didn’t seem to notice. That wouldn’t have happened for vscode (they might break it but they’ll also be in a hurry to fix it). I haven’t tried jetbrains own AI though. It might be fantastic for all I know.

[noone_youknow]

It’s a very noticeable step down from cursor in terms of AI integration IMO, but also a huge step up in almost everything else.

For a while I was running both cursor and RubyMine in tandem and switching between as needed, but lately I’ve been using Claude code for most stuff, in a RubyMine terminal and I hardly miss cursor at all.

[AstroBen]

Depends what your most used part of Cursor is - from my view the only thing Rubymine is missing is the next edit prediction which I've heard they're working on currently

The agent, chat mode and full line completion all work well

[andrewl]

I am going to try it. One nice thing about JetBrains IDEs is that they have all the functionality of the DataGrip database IDE built in.

This will be an issue for some users. Further down the page is a section on data collection:

Does my IDE send any data to JetBrains?

The terms of the non-commercial agreement assume that the product may also electronically send JetBrains anonymized statistics (IDE telemetry) related to your usage of the product’s features. This information may include but is not limited to frameworks, file templates used in the product, actions invoked, and other interactions with the product’s features. This information does not contain personal data.

[khaledh]

I'd like to see a comparison of IDE market share over the past decade or so. My assumption is that VS Code has gained market share exponentially, eating at both Visual Studio's and JetBrains' share significantly, leading JetBrains to start offering their products for free personal use to try to recoup some of that lost user base.

I could be wrong, but that's my observation based on the extreme popularity of VS Code and the abundance of extensions for virtually every language and framework out there.

[robenkleene]

On the IDE marketshare question, the Stackoverflow Developer Survey asks questions like this and I always jump to that section. Here's my comment on HN summarizing the most recent survey https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44725015

I also wrote about VS Code's early rising with a focus on marketshare here https://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-st...

I also think your observation about VS Code's rise forcing JetBrains into a corner is spot on.

On a side tangent, I find it odd that the whole VS Code phenomena is under analyzed. Before VS Code, text editors and IDEs were one of the healthiest software categories around, with the market leader hovering around 35%, which is great for competition enforcing quality (DAWs are still like this today). Now text editors have become more like the Adobe suite, where there's in 800 lb gorilla doing whatever it wants and everyone else is competing over scraps (if you say VS Code is actually good though, Photoshop was amazing when it made its rise too). Developers just let this happen to their core tool without anyone really talking about?

[npteljes]

I needed to pick up Ruby for a two year job, and RubyMine made my Ruby learning so much fun. I really appreciated the clever autocomplete and especially the suggestions. It would give recommendations like "this works, but it's not how people do things in Ruby. Try this instead" and the recommendation actually looked so slick and elegant (and Ruby-like, and not Java-like where I come from). I hope in my heart that sometime I'll have to use it again.

[renatovico]

I’ve been paying for JetBrains for the past 10 years, and I want to keep supporting them. For a long time, I used Vim (about 5 years straight). Then one day, JetBrains introduced IdeaVim (Vim emulation). After that, I tried Neovim, but LazyVim didn’t really click with me. Maybe I’m just getting older and don’t feel like spending so much time fine-tuning my setup anymore.

[philipallstar]

> Whether you’re learning Ruby and Rails, pushing open-source forward, creating dev content, or building your passion project, we want to make sure you have the tools to enjoy what you do even more… for free.

I don't know why they say this fatuous stuff. Obviously they don't want to do that, or they'd make all their tools available for nothing.

[saadn92]

My favorite thing about RubyMine is its ability to search so quickly for the text I'm looking for. I even used it for non-ruby projects just because I love the search functionality and that's what I'm used to. Definitely love that they did this.

[Alifatisk]

Good news, I just wish Ruby had better DX on Vscode across all platforms. The ecosystem now is broken. Things barely work. All I want is syntax highlight, autocomplete and jump to definition without any ai stuff.

I guess RubyMine is the only proper way to use Ruby.

[BowBun]

Agreed, I'm not sure how the github/shopify folks are doing their own work these days. I have to keep one archived extension + 2 others to try and cover the basic feature set you expect. I realize Ruby typing means some things aren't possible, but the fragmented toolset means the simple things keep breaking. I think some sort of 'champion' or company push will be needed to tidy things up at this point. Ironically, Shopify owns one of the Ruby extensions but it is feature incomplete.

[arresin]

This is smart from a business point of view imo. You want as many people on the platform as possible and you don’t forgo enterprize customers.

[langitbiru]

I don't understand. Of all offerings from Jetbrains, only Pycharm is free for commercial use. Others have restrictions like RubyMine.

[mdaniel]

That's not true: IntelliJ was the first one to come out licensed as Apache 2, and PyCharm (and the python plugin) followed suit. Both of them do have paid versions with more features, but IntelliJ and PyCharm open source builds are still very strong products and unquestionably not "phoning it in" releases

[npteljes]

IntelliJ IDEA Community version is also free for commercial use, it's Apache 2.0 licensed even (mostly).

[onionisafruit]

I would be interested to know the story there. It seems like a strange choice to be the only one free for commercial use.

[bdcravens]

Perhaps it has a dependency with a license that forbids those kind of restrictions?

[renewiltord]

Jetbrains really needs to step up their LLM game. Trying to stay in house is a mistake. I'm glad Claude code integrates well.

[futurecat]

great stuff. RubyMine has a great implementation of RBS.

[rghose]

Just another indication that ruby is dead?

[joshmn]

I am not sure how this contributes to the unfounded idea that ruby is dead—Shopify, Stripe, and GitHub amongst many others would like a word.

RubyMine isn’t the editor of choice for many of my fellow rubyists, but it is for me—IntelliJ’s LSP alone is a godsend when you’re diving deep into debugging weird gems. I have tried ruby-lsp from Shopify and it gets 95% there but that last 5% is what makes me hyper-productive.

Most of the community is on VS Code. We did have a weird, loud Danish guy using TextMate until recently, but I guess he switched to neovim.

Having said, RubyMine was very popular when ruby was on HN as much as AI is today. It hasn’t kept up, just like Sublime has been largely replaced by VS Code.

[onionisafruit]

RustRider and WebStorm are also free for non commercial use. I wouldn’t take that as an indication that Rust and the web are dead.

[bdcravens]

Probably more an indication that interest in RubyMine is dying, so they want to increase demand. I would look at development of VS Code extensions for any language to use as indications of demand. (in this case, the best one being ruby-lsp, which is still very active and alive)

[dismalaf]

More like since ruby-lsp has taken off, fewer Ruby users care about RubyMine.