My Ruby on Rails Development Environment on Ubuntu.

July 31, 2007 | 11 comments

The core Ruby on Rails development team uses TextMate, a MacOSX (only) programming text editor that is apparently the greatest thing ever. A quick Google search reveals countless blog and forum posts devoted to finding something with similar functionality on Linux and Windows.

I am starting to develop with Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu and three of the suggested alternatives looked attractive to me. If you are planning to develop exclusively in Ruby/Ruby on Rails and want the lightest weight solution that is probably closest to the TextMate experience, Gedit is a good alternative. But if you want a fuller experience, or if you develop in multiple languages, jEdit and Eclipse are (I would argue) the two best options.

Toward Less Mousing

April 5, 2007 | 7 comments

This week, I am exploring mouseless computing approaches, focusing primarily on the Ion window manager, but also trying other tools like the Hit-a-Hint Firefox extension, Cream and XBindKeys. I am doing this as much for the sake of computing resource efficiency as programming efficiency and usability, and I’m having a lot of fun along the way.