i m moved to gedit and redcar from netbeans on ubuntu for any ruby development. on ubuntu does anyone have any recommendations?

Try RubyMine from JetBrains, a very slick product, and worth paying for (I don't pay for much but JetBrains IDEs I make an exception for).

In true HN tradition, I must urge you to try Vim. I found this very helpful when I first start: http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...

Sometime I don't understand people that use Vim for everything.

I used Vim casually so I'm not an expert. I understand that it'll take a while to master it. But compare to netbeans where you can navigate Ruby code quite fast (shortcut to method implementation, class implementation, project browse, auto-suggest, etc), why would I want to use Vim when I have to find the proper plugins (not just one, but a few) before I can be productive (assuming they can do what I mentioned above).

I understand people who use VIm for everything. I've recently come ack to it after a few years away.

It's nice to have an editor you know how to be productive in when you start using a new tech.

In an average workday I'll touch ASP, JavaScript, Sass, CoffeeScript, PHP, and Ruby code. When I use VIm, I can use all of the shortcuts and things I've learned over the years to manipulate text. I know how to manage projects, find files, etc.

That's a huge advantage. Having to learn Eclipse to do Java or Visual Studio to do C# adds complexity cos you have to learn the tool and the language.

So yea, I totally get it. This goes for TextMate or Emacs too.

I don't use it for everything, hence my JetBrains recommendation. I use PyCharm a lot, too, for example, and Android dev is a hassle without Eclipse.

The portability of Vim-the-application and thus the portability of the skills to use it are a big reason why I put in the time to learn it (same applies for Emacs). I can just as comfortably program locally, on a remote server or on a friend's machine.

As a netbeans user but vim fanatic. I really like netbeans for project management, but vim is awesome for just manipulating text tons faster than you can with netbeans. Try the jVi plugin for netbeans to get that text editing power of vim with the project management features of netbeans.

In my line of duty, most of the time spent in reading code, not writing code.

Even when we were building version 1.0 of the software, there aren't too many text editing as opposed to navigating the code tree.

Isn't dynamic/scripting languages like Ruby and Python produced way less code than Java? (Hence, less typing again).

So this is why I don't quite get the group of people that swear by vim.

Try emacs or vim. I am die hard emacs user