I know text editor and IDE questions have pretty much been beat to death, but most of the answers I’ve found to this question are Windows and Mac specific, and also aren’t always free. I’ve just started rails development and I’m looking for a light-weight text-editor that supports syntax highlighting. I know there is RubyMine, RadRails, and Netbeans. I’ll probably always use one of them for big projects, however, sometimes I prefer to stay away from the IDEs (and all the project .xml .config workspace files they create, and the overhead of opening a file that isn’t located in a specific “project”) and just use a simple text editor. I had been using Scribes in the past for this but it doesn’t have highlighting for .rhtml. I’ve heard people struggle with gedit as well, and I’m nowhere near desperate enough to be running Notepad++ under wine. Sublime seems to be popular but isn’t free. Am I being too needy? Is there anything out there that meets the following criteria:
- Runs on linux
- Has syntax highlighting for rails (.rhtml, .erb, .rake, etc.)
- Is lightweight (not only the look and feel but also I don’t want it generating all the unnecessary baggage that IDEs do)
- Provides the basic features that pretty much all text editors do (I know this sounds vague and stupid but to be more specific all text editors should give you the option to specify the encoding, replace tabs with spaces, specify tab size, specify the default new line characters, etc. etc.)
- Free. Open source is a nice to have but not a requirement.
Also Gmate is nice. It’s Gedit with a number of plugins which make it behave like textmate.
https://github.com/gmate/gmate