I'm happy using TextMate and Terminal to develop in Ruby on Rail on Mac OS X.
I like being able to drag windows to resize them. I like having access to standard Mac shortcuts like command-X, etc. I like having the same look and feel as my other apps.
They both flow much more naturally than, say, PowerShell and Edit++ on Windows, which is why I've largely steered clear of using my Intel laptop for Rails.
But now I'm going to have to start swapping back and forth between my Mac and the Intel laptop so I'm thinking of installing Linux on the latter.
My question is in two parts:
(1) Can I install a terminal app and a text editor on Linux that flows just as naturally as TextMate and Terminal does on Mac OS X? Preferably, I'd want the same shortcuts etc on both platforms. (Except that the command key obviously gets mapped to control or whatever.)
(2) Failing that, I might move to a more Linux-like way of working on the Mac to create a situation where I'm working in the same way on both machines. To do this, is there an equivalent of MacVim on Linux, or should I just move to Vim on the Mac? What would be the parallel set-up (inc terminal app) on Linux?
I would recommend Aptana Studio 3, if you dare to switch to a full blown IDE.
(1) Aptana has a built in Terminal. Flowing as naturally as Terminal and TextMate? probably not.
(2) Aptana works on Linux, OS X and Windows, so everything should be the same.
Well if you plan to use your linux distro with gnome instead of kde, you probably should check gedit with gmate plugins, although is not like textmate power, it has a lot of it features. Another thing is that mac comes with zsh, so ur linux distro can also be installed with zsh and tuned to work with it, instead of the default gnome-terminal terminal.
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Running rails on windows 10 (finally got it to load up), new to the programming world.
Building my 1st web app. Should I be running rails thru an IDE (cloud 9, RubyMine) or some other virtual machine?? Any insight would be appreciated
Don't develop Rails apps on Windows, you will be in for a world of hurt. (Well, to be fair, a world of having to find your way around compatibility issues, which you can probably avoid from the outset.)
Get a virtual machine provider like VirtualBox or VMWare, find a Ubuntu VM somewhere, and get it running on that instead.
For IDEs, I used to like RubyMine, but it's quite memory-hungry; these days I tend to use Sublime Text and run commands in a terminal.
Work has issued me a MacBook Pro, but I am primarily an ASP.NET (C#) developer, so I spend most of my time in Windows 7 running on VMWare Fusion.
I have been asked to begin working on Ruby on Rails projects (which I am looking forward to). I find that I prefer the Windows 7 OS as I tend to be more productive in it over OSX, so I would like to setup my Rails dev environment on Windows 7.
Based on other user's experiences, I would like to know your recommendations how how to setup my Windows 7 environment to develop Ruby on Rails with Postgres as the database.
While doing some initial research I did find this post on using Vagrant with VirtualBox which sounded interesting, but I am wondering if I could just do something similar with my existing OSX install.
Also, I am not completely opposed to running my Rails dev environment in OSX, so I am willing to hear arguments in favor of this approach. Do Windows and Rails/Postgres work well together as a dev environment?
Thanks for any helpful feedback you can provide.
I'll try to persuade you to use OS X.
Windows ruby development brings a vast amount of problems with gems. Especially with native extensions.
The second argument for OS X, is that it is UNIX based system, which is much closer to production environment. Nobody deploys to windows.
Most of ruby tutorials and manuals require unix based system.
Just give OS X a chance, and you will be much productive, spending time on you applications business logic, and not asking other questions, related with windows&ruby problems.
Don't use vagrant inside windows at vmware fusion. It seems really strange :)
The most common ruby development style - is simple text editor and terminal. Thats all, you don't need windows for that.
Hello,
I'm using bash or cmd for Rails console.
I get this weird symbols like <-[1m.
In my tutorial I see the output fine (With spaces and color), and it's difficult to read it in my cmd...
Can you help me to display those special characters right?
Thanks!
Instead of using cmd, run rails and ruby through cygwin, it works better than cmd as cygwin is supposed to bring you a linux environnement on windows. When i tried to do rails on windows it was the most complete tool.
I insist on the fact that you should use a Linux VM to do rails on windows. If you install VMWare player on your windows, you will have a virtual machine running in vmware on your windows desktop. This machine will be connected to you network. I strongly advise you to use this solution, as you will encounter many problems using rails on windows.
I work on windows, and i have a Virtual Ubuntu always launched. My VM share the code via samba and i edit it with sublim text executed in windows. On my second screen i have my VM full screen that display multiple terminals.
Ok, I found this wonderful software https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ and it did solve my problem :)
cmd.exe doesn't understand those color codes.
There is a project to make cmd understand them (and add other useful feaures) here. I do not use windows, so I cannot vouch for the quality of it.
I am currently starting Ruby on Rails development and currently use Windows (XP or 7), but I find lots of cases where gems don't seem to do what they should or its a pain to install and use them under Windows, like twitter-bootstrap seems fine for Mac OS but I had to work out that sass-bootstrap was better for Windows. It just goes on and on, like today I cannot seem to get launchy to do its thing when RSpec testing, although I know that my lack of experience doesn't help.
So should I just get a Mac ? Would getting a Mac give me an easier life ? Most RoR developers seem to use them and most example tutorials seem to assume I do to.
Thanks for any advice
The simplest answer is you can do RoR development on any of the platforms easily.
Personally, I started doing development in Windows, then switched to VirtualBox on windows running Ubuntu. I now have a MacBook Pro and must say it's the happiest environment so far!
Windows - Reasonably straightforward to install rails, but seemed much slower that other enviroments. Lack of simple console with color highlighting was annoying
Ubuntu - Faster than under windows (even when virtualized!). If you don't know linux, it's a lot less fun, steep learning curve for command line stuff and lots of dependencies to resolve
Mac - Best of both worlds, pretty UI for day to day stuff, awesome command line support, Ruby and RoR run super fast on MacBook Pro.
I don't use a mac, I use linux, but I switched from Windows early in my experience with Rails. Using a mac is way better than using windows. The cheap option is to just dual-boot your windows machine with Ubuntu.
Just get off of windows.
See this for more details:
Getting Ruby on Rails environment working and installing sqlite3
Edit: VirtualBox is also an option for those whose processor supports it.
i would suggest to try out with any linux versions like Ubuntu, centos, fedora...
I think you can use linux version - ubuntu 12.04 because there are some ruby gems that are not working on windows like rubyracer, less-rails.
Install VirtualBox and run an Ubuntu or Redhat virtual linux machine.
I develop in Rails under Windows at work and at home most of the time. There are a few instances where gems won't work or will require a little more work to get running properly. There are also instances where developing on Windows and deploying to Linux/*NIX environment can cause problems, usually involving Windows-specific gems in your Gemfile.lock which aren't compatible on Linux/*NIX.
All-in-all, it's not too much trouble as long as you watch out for the gotchas.
I also use Mac OS X for Rails development and I like the development experience much more than I do on Windows. That being said, I certainly don't need a Mac to be able to develop in Rails effectively.
I also started with Rails development and recently bought myself a MacBook Pro. A Mac has solutions for running Windows, in case you also still need to do development on the Microsoft technology stack. You can install Windows via Bootcamp, which is a built in solution. Or run Windows in a virtual instance with virtualization software like Parallels.
hope this helps,
Anthony
Hello I've been a Rails developer on Windows for quite some time now, but I recently completed my biggest project yet (it's quite extensive, took me over a year to build) but I am having trouble deploying it. The combination of it's size, complexity and a windows environment is making it needlessly complex to deploy. I am thinking about getting an old mac mini and using it just for rails development.
Either that or install unix on another box.
Is there any way I can port my app to this mac or linux machine, without having to start over? I can't find any resources on the internets about this.
Rails is designed to be fairly platform flexible. What gems are you using in your application that won't run on linux / OS X? Usually compatibility issues run the other way (as very few Rails professional developers run Windows). It is hard to debug when you don't include any of the errors you get, etc.
Unless you have very specific system calls in your app there shouldn't be any need to "port" anything as it should work as is on Linux or OS X. Out of curiosity, what kind of problems are you running into with deployment?