I’ve been reading a lot about the Pragmatic Programmers using TextMate on Macs as their preferred environment. I wanted to see what this was like but could’t because I can’t afford a Mac at the moment.
Discovered the ‘E’ text editor , which is TextMate compatible and pretty good. It will run TextMate bundles and so on. One of the wrinkles is that it uses Cygwin to do its automation, which I always use. But, of course, it therefore wants to run Ruby in that environment and gets very confused when it finds the Windows version, which gets confused by the Cygwin paths.
So, you need to install the Ruby that comes with Cygwin. Fire up the setup program and you’ll find Ruby under interpreters.
Next you need Ruby Gems and Rails – have a look here for instructions. You essentially need to download the gems distro and run ruby setup.rb when you’ve unpacked it – this will put gems into your Cygwin area too.
I intend to run Rails native windows and use the Cygwin Ruby for ‘e’ automation.
By the way – if you see a message saying something like “ubyopt invalid optio” then you need to go into your system settings and get rid of the environment variable RUBYOPT. Cygwin ruby is confused by it because you have’t got gems installed yet.
Have fun.
I’ve had a look at RadRails and one of the other Eclipse tools but don’t like them very much. Mainly because the code editors don’t do indent properly, which just gets on my nerves. They’re OK.