Rails development on Windows

Question

I have been developing Rails applications on windows platform for a couple of month now and I'm still looking for right tools how to do it more effectively.

I'm using Netbeans IDE and running all rails commands through windows CMD (including GIT). But NB feels kind a bloated and slow. I have tried using gVim but i did not have so much time to play with it. Basically I need NB only for debugging.

So I want to know what tools does other rails developers use on windows and how you arrange your work flow.

Answer 1

Check out Best IDE for Ruby on Rails, Best Editor/IDE for Ruby, Preferred Ruby IDE and Continouse Integration for Ruby on Rails

Answer 2

Personally, I use cygwin and notepad++. Cygwin basically emulates the terminal that you would use on a unix system, which is much more easier to work with than cmd, and notepad++ is a very lightweight editor.

This may or may not be what you're looking for depending on your familiarity with unix systems.

Answer 3

Virtualbox + Ubuntu Linux + rvm + Editor of your choice.

Answer 4

I'd recommend setting up a linux virtual machine, throw RVM and Nginx/Passenger on there and set up FTP for remote editing. For editor I really like E TextEditor, it's compatible with all of TextMates bundles so you have a good rails community behind it.

Answer 5

I tried rails development on Windows and almost immediately discovered one of the gems I needed was *nix only. It seemed like I could look forward to a lot of that is I stayed with Windows so I switched. Initially I ran Ubuntu in a Virtualbox VM. Eventually I realized that I never really used Windows any more and switched to Ubuntu entirely.

Since switching to Ubuntu I can now set up my Rails development environment with a single bash script which has been pretty helpful. I also set up launchers to help me get set up faster. I use Netbeans, with the Open File Fast plugin. Between the Rails commands and git, I stick to the command line for almost everything.

Because of that I am considering ditching Netbeans in favour of vim. There is a bunch of interesting stuff about textmate-y plugins for rails here. Peepcode also has some videos about using VIM as an IDE.

That's what works for me.