A few weeks ago, I broke down and bought a laptop. My first two computers were laptops, but once I hit college, I decided the cost outweighed the benefits. But over the the past few months, I’ve realized that I move from computer to computer enough that having a laptop instead would be a boon to my productivity.

I decided to leave Windows on the laptop and do most of my development within colinux. I’ve struggled to find an editor for developing within windows that I really like. While I’ve used Crimson Editor quite a bit, it’s out of active development and occassionally leaves me very frustrated (FTP issues in particular, which is not much of an issue for me now). So, I’d planned to use KDE’s Kate editor within colinux.

You can ignore the preceding two paragraphs. They’re merely anecdotal.

Then, I stumbled across RadRails. It’s an extension of Eclipse, which I know I’ve looked at before, but apparently dissavowed for reasons forgotten. While RadRails is pre-1.0, I’ve been extremely pleased. The stand-alone version comes with the SVN plugin bundled, so it’s been near to perfect for me. One of my favorite features is the ability to start/stop my development servers directly from RadRails.

Now that I’ve used RadRails on my WinXP laptop, I decided that for many functions, I like it better than Kate. And I definately like it’s SVN integration better than kdesvn (Although I have had a couple of weird errors that I can’t now remember). You can also just install three plugins on top of Eclipse to get all the RadRails functionality (listed here), which I found useful because I wasn’t sure how to go about installing the stand-alone on Ubuntu. This way, I used apt to get Eclipse, then installed the three plugins. For anyone like me new to Eclipse, to install the plugins, open Eclipse, and go to Help->Software Updates->Find and Install. Pretty self-explanatory after that, but I didn’t think to check the help menu until after a bit of Googling.

One more tip for the Plugin install for those new to Eclipse: To get the full Rails goodies, go to Window->Open Perspective->Other… then click “Rails” and “OK”. Gives you, for example, the servers list.

Update 10/11/06: I guess I should have looked earlier, but the RadRails community page has a lot of helpful tips, including an article about setting up RadRails in WinXP. (Particularly helped me in getting rake tasks to work).