The Workshop

In the development scene lots of people are using Macs and OS X. If you can afford to buy a Mac (or you already have one or maybe more :)) the best choice for you must be TextMate. I can say it is the best code editor what I’ve seen so far on the OS X platform. It has lots of useful features, such as text snippets (for Ruby On Rails as well).

“TextMate brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.”

A list of highlights follow, you can follow the links to learn more.

• Ability to Search and Replace in a Project
• Auto-Indent for Common Actions Like Pasting Text
• Auto-Pairing of Brackets and Other Characters
• Clipboard History
• Column Selections and Column Typing
• Completion of Words from Current Document
• CSS-like Selectors to Pinpoint the Scope of Actions and Settings
• Declarative Language Grammars for Graceful Mixing and Hacking
• Dynamic Outline for Working With Multiple Files
• Expand Trigger Words to Code Blocks With Tab-able Placeholders
• File Tabs when Working With Projects
• Foldable Code Blocks
• Function Pop-up for Quick Overview and Navigation
• Plug-able Through Your Favorite Scripting Language
• Recordable Macros With No Programming Required
• Regular Expression Search and Replace (grep)
• Run Shell Commands from Within a Document
• Support for Darcs, Perforce, SVK, and Subversion
• Support for More Than 50 Languages
• Switch Between Files in Projects With a Minimum of Key Strokes
• Themable Syntax Highlight Colors
• Visual Bookmarks to Jump Between Places in a File
• Works As External Editor for (s)ftp Programs (for example: Transmit)
• Works Together With Xcode and Can Build Xcode Projects

So if you are a Ruby On Rails developer and you are using OS X, TextMate is probably the best choice for you.

Check out the official website for full feature list, screencasts and also a 30 days trial version for download.

Update: I’ve found a small “Cheat Sheet for Rails Hackers” written by Mike Clark from PragmaticStudio.com. It contains some of the most useful shortcuts for Ruby On Rails in TextMate. Check out this little PDF to speed up your Rails development. And a cool wallpaper with the most useful keyboard shortcuts, to get things done faster