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.
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!