Okay, so I just got started trying to learn ruby on rails, and ALL OF THE DEMONSTRATIONS I’ve found use TextMate for MacOSX.

I used to run apple, and I used to use textmate - its pretty buff!

I run debian linux on my laptop now and I learned how to configure Gedit, gnomes default editor to emulate the things textmate does for our apple friends.

If you run Debian or Ubuntu on your machine and you want to code rails, you’re in luck. Just make sure you have gedit installed (if not, run sudo apt-get install gedit) and you should be well on your way.

First, open Gedit.

Here we have the default Gedit window.

Click “Edit”, then “Preferences” and you should see this window. Once you’re here in the ‘view’ tab, check everything but ‘Display right margin’.

Now click on the ‘Editor’ tab. I shortened the tab width to 4, and enabled automatic indentation and autosaving here.

Then, under the ‘Plugins’ tab, scroll down and check ‘File browser pane’ and ‘Snippets’

Now hit the F9 key. You can see that a pane appears to the left

There are two little tabs in the very bottom left hand corner now, go ahead and hit the right little tab - the window should change to this:

You should be all set now! You can navigate your filesystem and doubleclick files, and they will open, be syntax highlighted and appear as tabs across the top of the editor! Congratulations! You win! eat cookies.