Ever heard of
Ruby? Rails?
Ruby on Rails? If you don't know, Ruby is a newer very efficient programming language and revolutionary way to code applications. Rails is a web framework that makes coding in Ruby easier by adding a lot to it's innate functionality and suave style. After becoming jealous of the Mac users out there who had a great text editor to use when coding Ruby (at least in the video tutorials), I decided to find a good one for Windows. Enter
SciTe, which is a great text editor that comes pre-packaged with "
InstantRails." InstantRails is somewhat like a LAMP installation for Windows, but with Ruby on Rails instead of Perl, Python, or PHP. SciTe is also available apart from InstantRails, and does a great job of editing CSS, HTML, and many other types of syntax as well. I am now using it for most of my "quick-drop-and-give-me-20" programming tasks, such as downloading and editing a CSS file by hand from a web server. That's right, I still make hardcore edits oldskool style (I thought everyone still did, my bad), and SciTe makes it easy. Integrated with my favorite ftp client (
FileZilla, also free) it makes shotgun edits simple, and almost fun. SciTe is a free download.
Tags: development, freeware, IDE, opensource, programming, Rails, Ruby, Rubyonrails, scite, texteditor, windows
Facebook Plunges Again
Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsJordan RunningJul 12th 2006 3:09AM
SciTE is a fantastic general-purpose text editor. I use it many times every day for everything from hacking Ruby and PHP to editing HTML and CSS to doing advanced find-and-replace. It's by no means perfect, but as a fast, free, open source replacement for commercial editors (I was a loyal TextPad user before I found SCiTE), I find it indispensible.
As far as Ruby on Rails goes, however, I've found that it's not the best development environment. For one thing, Rails development requires dealing with a lot of files, so some rudimentary project management features come very much in handy, and SCiTE lacks these entirely. No, for RoR development I much prefer RadRails (www.radrails.org), an Eclipse-based IDE that has things like built-in version control and server/generator/plugin management. It's not a perfect tool, either, but it's improving rapidly and I'm really growing to rely on it.
BrandtJul 12th 2006 10:50AM
I'll second the thoughts of the first poster. SciTE is great text editor to replace notepad and even some of the more powerfull alternatives such as editplus. It is on my "essential software" list for sure.
BrennanJul 12th 2006 3:29PM
Does anyone know right offhand if SciTE keeps all its configuration in its home directory? I'd love a nice portable programming editor that I can run from my USB drive.
DavidJul 16th 2006 4:33PM
In response to #3, SciTE does keep it's config files in the application's directory (at least on the Windows version). I use it on my thumb drive with no problems at all. Very handy.