Yesterday I bought textmate. Today I'm starting to learn Rails. How should I set up (and what should I know about) textmate to make things as easy and fast as possible?
Apologies in advance for not answering your question directly. Frankly, I wish I could have caught you before you paid for Textmate, as I would have encouraged you to try VIM.
VIM has become one of the most popular editors among Rails developers and many Textmate users are making/have made the switch (myself included). It takes a week or two to get familiar with VIM, but once you are comfortable you'll never go back to Textmate. Having just gone through the VIM learning process, I think you should do the following:
1) Download MacVIM (I assume you're on a Mac) and understand that your VIM configuration is stored in your ~/.vim folder and ~/.vimrc file
3) Build your own .vimrc file from scratch-- research everything you add to your .vimrc using :help (:help is huge, don't discount this) and Google. Think of this step as building your own text editor. VIM is extremely customizable, but unfortunately it doesn't ship with all of the functionality that users expect enabled
4) Install pathogen, then install each of these plugins in the bundle folder in your .vim directory:
- rails.vim (syntax highlighting, navigation, and much more)
- snipmate (easily create custom code snippets)
- nerdtree (browse project files)
- command-t (find/open files within project easily)
- vividchalk (color scheme)
- ack (text search within project)
There are probably 100 other plugins people will recommend, but I think these are a good start
5) Write a blog article about your experience. I'll be posting mine soon!
If a programmer tells you to use vim or emacs, tell them no. These editors are for when you are a better programmer.
All you need right now is an editor that lets you put text into a file.
From Zed's LPTHW. While Vim/MacVIM is my editor of choice, if someone is just getting started and using RoR - TextMate or any easy to start with non-modal editor seems like the right choice. Trying to learn vim while learning a new language/framework at the same time could get frustrating. TextMate is still very popular, easy to start with, and last I checked (admittedly a very long time ago) the editor used in Railscasts.
For themes, I prefer 'Blackboard' with the font changed to Inconsolata, but play around with the various color schemes and choose whichever you prefer. You'll probably spend a lot of time looking at it.
Now, bookmark: http://api.rubyonrails.org/ and pretty much keep it open somewhere all the time. It's invaluable for rooting through why things aren't working.
Lastly, rails is full of magic. Magic that sometimes is quite far removed from the actual errors you run into. Your first few months will probably have more than a few very frustrating moments where things just don't work and you can't figure out why. Stackoverflow is your friend, and no question is stupid. If you can't google an answer, just ask.
I find Rubymine very useful. Some of it is just wrappers to shell commands, but other parts have syntax highlighting and suggestions and catching syntax errors. I like the git VCS integration and the debugging. I program Rails with it and really find it useful.
I agree and use both RubyMine and TextMate, usually separately, but when I am coding in Ruby (usually Rails work) I sometimes like to keep RubyMine and TextMate open on the same project because it is so fast to zip around to look at different files in TextMate. (I do the same sometimes for Java, keeping both IntelliJ and TextMate open.)
It may seem perverse keeping two editing systems open at once, but it works for me. I also even more perversely often keep TextMate open when I am working in Common Lisp or Clojure with Emacs.
VIM has become one of the most popular editors among Rails developers and many Textmate users are making/have made the switch (myself included). It takes a week or two to get familiar with VIM, but once you are comfortable you'll never go back to Textmate. Having just gone through the VIM learning process, I think you should do the following:
1) Download MacVIM (I assume you're on a Mac) and understand that your VIM configuration is stored in your ~/.vim folder and ~/.vimrc file
2) Search for example .vimrc files-- Tim Pope has a nice example at https://github.com/tpope/tpope/blob/master/.vimrc
3) Build your own .vimrc file from scratch-- research everything you add to your .vimrc using :help (:help is huge, don't discount this) and Google. Think of this step as building your own text editor. VIM is extremely customizable, but unfortunately it doesn't ship with all of the functionality that users expect enabled
4) Install pathogen, then install each of these plugins in the bundle folder in your .vim directory:
There are probably 100 other plugins people will recommend, but I think these are a good start5) Write a blog article about your experience. I'll be posting mine soon!