Redcar Blog

I completely agree - Sublime Text is awesome.

I originally coded in C# with Visual Studio. The part I had most difficulty with while switching to Ruby wasn't the syntax change (I loved that part), but the editor. Visual Studio really does a lot for you, but you don't even need to do most of that stuff in Ruby.

Just finding a good text editor for Ruby is a challenge. I'm very picky about text editors, and I prefer to code in Windows, just because it's the most comfortable environment (in my opinion). I was coding in Redcar (http://redcareditor.com/) which is a cross-platform Ruby IDE. It was very buggy and felt gross. It wasn't efficient, and it is missing a lot. I tried Notepad++, but after 5 minutes of it, I didn't want to deal with it. It just felt really old. I tried Vim too, and of what little I do know of making it more productive, I thought it was awesome. I don't want to spend that much time learning how to use the utilities for coding though, I want to get started. I use Vim for editing various config files on my server machine, but other than that I rarely use Vim

Then, I tried Sublime Text 2 and I knew that's what I was going to go with. It was much cleaner, stabler, and offered the right kinds of things, things that I didn't get with Redcar, Visual Studio, or (especially) Notepad++.

I didn't use it for a long time. It works, but it still needs cygwin to be install for some snippets.
That's a little ironic. installing cygwin on wine.. but I guess that's the only way to get a text-mate like editor on linux.

Or you could try something called Red Car Editor (http://redcareditor.com) which proclaims to be an editor specially made for ruby/rails programmers. It looks pretty impressive, but again I couldn't get it installed properly. (I think the latest version runs on jRuby platform)

EDIT: I got inspired to try Red Car again after posting this comment. Uninstalled Ruby completely from Windows 7, installed jRUby 1.5. Red car gem installation went perfectly, but the editor is shockingly slow and unresponsive. I don't know if the same applies to linux platform, or if there is something wrong with my system (its a 2 year old laptop, and its been a long while since I have reinstalled the Windows OS)

Some rubyists are trying with red car http://redcareditor.com/ but it's still quite a ways off from being usable.

Sublime Text (www.sublimetext.com) could theoretically be ported over to Linux and Windows as it's GUI is all OpenGL and C interfacing with python. The author's original intent was that it be portable between platforms, but he seems to have pushed that idea to the side. He's no longer working on it full-time either. Which is a shame because it's quite good and comparable to TextMate in many ways.