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Love Spreads - Stone Roses

Two tools I've found indispensable in the work I'm doing with Ruby on Rails. They are available for OS X.

TextMate: Although I'd love an editor that can do code completion with Ruby, this is a great editor that understands a fair number of languages. One feature I particularly like is their concept of commands which can encompass editor commands, code snippets, and other template-type snippets. Those are configurable per-file type which is nice. I have also looked at Ruby Development Tools (built on Eclipse) and Komodo. Komodo might be something I migrate to eventually since it looks like it can do the code completion and "live" templates, but right now there is an incestuous relationship between TextMate and the next tool.

Locomotive: "Locomotive is a flexible one-click solution to Ruby on Rails development for Mac OS X 10.3+. In one self-contained application, it gives you a fully functional Rails development platform ..." This is pretty amazing. It's like getting your web server, application server, and database in one. Very compartmentalized and easy to add new bundles for different runtime configurations. For example, I can switch easily between different environments by changing a pulldown menu. And Locomotive is self-contained so it doesn't break any existing RoR setup you might have installed. Locomotive has, by far, bootstrapped my Ruby on Rails development the most.

Oh right, the incestuous relationship ... I can right-click on the application from the Locomotive applications menu and open the entire application structure in TextMate.

Locomotive also knew I had iTerm installed and allowed me to use that instead of Apple's terminal application. This is for dropping to the command-line to run the scripts to generate the various Ruby on Rails bits.

Hope this helps if you're considering any Ruby on Rails development under OS X.

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