Now that you’ve got your Rails development environment set up and running, you’re probably asking what you would use to actually build something for it.
The question of which text-editor to use for Rails development is a fairly lengthy discussion, so I’ll just go ahead and throw some ideas into the mix:
1. JEdit - http://www.jedit.org/
2. RIDE-ME - http://www.projectrideme.com/
3. InType - http://intype.info
4. Meadow - http://www.meadowy.org/meadow/
5. Cream - http://cream.sourceforge.net
If you’re a pure web designer, none of the above applications will be familiar to you. That’s ok though, because until I started writing this series, I had never heard of the first 3 applications on the list either. The only two editors I’ve had any experience using on Windows are, ironically, not even native to the Windows environment. Meadow and Cream are based on two of the oldest text-editors on the planet (Meadow is based on emacs, and Cream is a modernized version of vi; both editors were first released over 30 years ago).
Because neither Meadow nor Cream are specific to Ruby and/or Rails, there are several steps involved in actually getting up and running with them. I’ve always joked that Emacs (and by association, Meadow) has the steepest learning curve of any text-editor ever created, but it can be incredibly powerful once you’ve had some time to get used to it. That said, it’s probably not a good idea to overly-complicate your first foray into the Rails world.
From my very cursory inspection of the other three editors on the list, InType seems to be the most promising, as it attempts to recreate the minimalist Textmate experience on Windows. (It’s interesting to note that if we were installing Rails on Mac OSX, we wouldn’t be discussing text-editors at all. You basically use Textmate. Period.) JEdit and RIDE-ME look ok as well, although they depend on the Java Runtime and .NET 2.0 respectively, which may not be installed on your machine. In that sense, Intype is a good choice just because it’s the quickest way to get started (not to mention that it’s a 650kb download).
That said, Intype is still missing a couple of things, not the least of which is some semblance of project support and tabbed browsing. The project is still in alpha, so the developers have quite a ways to go before they’re ready to really call themselves the Textmate of Windows. They’re off to a great start though, and should become a very viable alternative for serious development very soon.