I am a Rails developer who uses a proper IDE (Netbeans for Ruby) and Windows. Installed Cygwin to give me the bash shell and the other tools I need to talk to our Linux server backbones. I started on Unix/Sun workstations, went to client/server stuff then on to web. DHH is a kid, bless him, and has’t yet lived through the next big change that will make him realise he has to start again. I’ve done it maybe 5 times in the last 20 years. Experience of one’s own ignorance makes one humble. He’s on a high now. Losing your job is a great and unwelcome teacher, believe me.
I don’t get the Mac thing, either. If you don’t want windows Ubuntu is fine, has the sexy desktop thing and runs on more powerful kit that costs a quarter of the price.
Don’t get me started about TextMate – it’s a word processor with a bunch of arcane key combinations to run a pile of bundled bash shell scripts. I could probably do something similar with Vim or Emacs but don’t need to because the nice guys from Sun have written very good free tool. Can’t split a view of the same file – just like a word processor all you can see is the few lines around where you are working. http://francis.blog-city.com/debugging_rails_applications.htm