It seems many people are still looking for the right IDE to use when doing Rails development. Or, more correctly, most of those who don’t own a Mac do.

For those of you who, like me, don’t feel like buying a Mac just because of a neat editor here’s my suggestion:

• GVim for file editing,
• GVim’s buffers menu teared off from the main window, showing all open files,
• Nautilus for project browsing and occasional file opening via drag’n drop
• xterm for everything else ;-)

Buffer menu and Nautilus are completely optional, but they help feeling comfortable with Vim when you’re new to it and/or are a frequent mouse user.

The colors shown in the screenshot are heavily inspired by the beautiful Textmate Vibrant Ink Theme made by Justin Palmer.

Good starting points for customizing your (G)Vim are:

• VimRubySupport - rubygarden.org
• HowtoUseVimWithRails - wiki.rubyonrails.org
• vim-scripts