As a developer with some experience on VC++ and MFC, Visual Studio had already spoilt me a great deal. When i started I just could not believe that an entire application be developed on text editors like notepad or Scite. Here is more about other editors: http://www.devx.com/RubySpecialReport/Article/34454/ because I chose Aptana-radrails and most of this blog will talk about that.
If you are very used to Visual Studio and likes here is one editor that comes close (somewhat) when you wanna develop a Rails or pure Ruby Application. Good thing is its quite integrated (many features in one) and its VS like.

Here is a quick set of hotkeys that i found really useful:

  • ctrl+q = open last closed tab
  • ctrl+w = close current tab
  • ctrl+e = opens the list of all open tabs so you can run thru them
  • ctrl+l = Goto line number
  • ctrl+ m = Maximize/Minimize
  • ctrl+n=New (file/project etc.)
  • ctrl+h = Search in Workspace
  • ctrl+f = Find/replace
They are documented in Key Assist (Ctrl+Shift+L) with many more but I ‘d actually use only the mentioned ones.
So its handy! :-)

And Also like VS when you wanna find the definition of one function or variable its easy. Just ctrl+click on the variable or function name and flash!!!! there you are…  

If you are working on a “Ruby” (and not Rails) or selenium project, you may go for Ruby perspective. For rails have RadRails plugin installed and get going. I love using “Data perspective” quite often. That saves me a lot of time firing queries on database. It just list all the tables and represents them graphically. You may (if you are very fond of SQL) write queries in the in-built sql browser and see results. 
Aptana also comes with in built web server (webbrick and mongrel) and web browsers. I rarely use browsers tho. I ’d prefer IE-7.0. or may be Mozilla when i need Firebug.    
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