Ever since I saw the famous Ruby on Rails screencast, I was mightily impressed. Not only by the Rails framework the screencast was showing off, but also by the editing environment in which the code was being written.
It seems that Texmate is the standard for developing Rails apps on the Mac. Unfortunately, me and 95% of the population don't seem to own a Mac, so we're stuck with what Windows has to offer.
To be honest with you, it ain't so good!
Now I am pretty sure that I have tried em all. I started using Textpad and CuteFTP during my development efforts. And this worked for quite a while. But then I learned that I could work a little faster with a good code editor. For some reason, this led me to Dreamweaver. I suppose the main reason being that it had built-in FTP and some good HTML auto completion. (this was back in the day when I tested on an external server.)
Dreamweaver is great at HTML editing, but it ain't really suited for PHP development. So I began my search in earnest. And since then I am pretty confident that I have tried them all. But not one has completely satisfied my hunger for that perfect Windows code editor for web development languages. Each seems to have its annoyances, or is missing one thing that I need.
By this point, I simply wanted to buy a spangly new iMac just so I could use Textmate. I had never used the software, but it has always looked so damn useful.
But now I think I found Windows answer to Textmate: inType
Intype is a powerful and intuitive code editor for Windows with lightning fast response. It is easily extensible and customizable, thanks to support for scripting and native plug-ins. It makes development in any programming or scripting language quick and easy.
Although only in Alpha form, this very fast code editor seems to be extremely useful, in that it is very customisable. Something that I think all software should be. It also has support for Textmate snippets.
Don't believe me? Watch the screencast and you will be mightily impressed.
At the moment I am using Zend Studio for PHP development, and Eclipse - in particular RadRails - for Ruby on Rails dev. I gotta admit that Zend Studio is the best for PHP, and I the same goes for RadRails, but they still have that little something missing. But I think these may be replaced by inType very soon. It's not really usable at the moment, as the Alpha is still missing basic features, such as muliple file support and undo/redo. But these are coming soon.
Watch the inType screencasts and download the Alpha. I promise you that you will not be dissapointed.