Lions, Snow Leopards, and Ruby, Oh My!

How painful was the process upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion? How did it affect my Ruby development workflow? Not bad. But there were some painful parts.

I feel like outlining a quick process of what I went through, so here you go!

Step 1: Install Lion

OS X App Store –> Purchase Lion –> Install.

Fairly straightforward. This went fine. I’m impressed that the install process happens without anything but a download. This is really cool. Apple is innovating in great ways, and in many ways.

Step 2: Install XCode 4

If you don’t do this nothing will work. This part failed for me because it complained of some iTunes helper. I had to search for the process in Activity Helper to kill it. You can also try the following ps -Af | grep iTunes in terminal and then kill -9 the appropriate task id.

Once that was finally over I knew it was time to update homebrew, rvm, and all my gems.

Step 3: Update Homebrew

You should update and upgrade homebrew for many reasons. One to ensure compatibility with Lion, and secondly you have to otherwise it won’t run anything you installed previously due to the installation of XCode 4.

This one was fairly simple. brew update and then brew upgrade.

Step 4: Update RVM

rvm update --head rvm reload rvm repair all

After this everything worked pretty smoothly. Except per a project I have to reinstall all my gems. There may be an easier way to do this but right now I’m just doing it manually per project I work on.

Step 5: Deleting gems per a project

The gems need to be updated otherwise they won’t reference the new libraries compiled.

Here’s what I had to run:

rvm gemset empty gem install bundle bundle install

You are using bundler right? Otherwise this would be extremely painful. install bundle`

Done, and my thoughts on Lion.

So far so good. Lion is interesting. I like the new gestures. I set my scrollbar to autohide. I like the iOS style word auto-correction. I’ve only noticed this in Safari so far. The oddest thing is the reversing of the scrollbar direction. I am not changing it to the old ways, I shall conform to the new ways of the future. It makes sense with a touchpad, however if you use a mouse with a scroller it feels REALLY weird. I need to upgrade my mouse to a touch mouse for sure now.

I’m not using Terminal.app anymore on Lion. I started to use iTerm 2.

What are your thoughts and experience with Lion so far?