Long time readers of this blog will remember that I used to tweak GNOME’s gedit editor a lot. However, I ditched it for Sublime Text and I am not looking back. Here are some of the things I like about Sublime:

• Offers a good out-of-the-box experience, including an amazing “fuzzy search” tool (ctrl+p)
• It works on ubuntu without any problems
• Fast (enough)
• Multiple cursors!
• Once you have installed Package Control: An integrated extension repository
• Encourages you to write your own extensions
• Looks good
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And you’ll never want to miss them again!

So you’ve installed (or upgraded to) ubuntu 11.10 and everything looks great… Except – uh!, lots of gedit plugins are only compatible with gedit 2! But don’t be sad.. or angry.. This guide points out, how to, nevertheless, create a solid foundation that allows you getting prodcutive with gedit!

How to get the following for your gedit:

• Up-to-date Ruby syntax highlighting
• Proper highlighting for .js.erb or .yml.erb files
• Gemfile.lock highlighting
  
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With the easy-to-use (and pre-installed) command line utility zenity, it is pretty simple to create useful external tools for gedit!

You can, of course, use an IDE for coding – but reconsider it: After hours of initialization, it tries to do everything for you… Somewhere in the never ending menu jungle… And you need to click all the time… Stop! Focus on the gist! You want to write code!

Most Ruby programmers know: Many things can be done in much less time on the command line. To become more productive, you should take the 10 minutes to configure some basic settings.

A common Ruby experience on ubuntu: You get some stupid error, saying something would be missing – and you don’t know what to do…

Installing Ruby/Rails on ubuntu is not hard, but some little obstacles might be confusing.

No, I am not an Apple hater. But I want to point out, that it is possible to turn an ubuntu into a sweet Ruby development environment – without TextMate!