E Text Editor 1.0.20 Beta

The E Text Editor is basically a TextMate clone for Windows. It shares many of TextMate's strengths and weaknesses. Because several TextMate bundles rely on Unix capabilities, E asks that you install Cygwin to enable those bundles. E has a few Windows-specific bundles of its own, for example to support C# and ASP.Net, and ships without the obvious Mac-specific bundles, such as ActionScript and Objective-C.

E takes advantage of the community that has grown up around TextMate. Most of what's in the TextMate book applies equally well to E, and many TextMate bundles downloaded from the Macromates Subversion repository will run as is in E. Some won't, of course; Windows currently doesn't have an AppleTalk clone, at least that I know of.

E has a project view that's surprisingly useful. As you can see here, the E project view on my computer also shows the TortoiseSVN icon for each file. E also has its own local versioning mechanism.

I experienced occasional crashes when using E, but I couldn't reproduce them well enough for a bug report. The author appears to be responsive; I saw two updates to the product during my tests.

If you adopt E as your primary Rails development environment, consider using RadRails or NetBeans as a free secondary IDE for your debugging and refactoring needs.

Intype 0.3.1 Alpha

Intype is a fast, efficient code editor for Windows that was inspired by TextMate. It's actually good enough to use as a free Alpha test version, but it lacks many of the features implemented in E. For starters, it has no project view; it's missing about half of the Rails bundle; and it has no bundle editor. Unlike E, it has no way to implement bundle features that require Unix functionality.

Given its omissions, I'd only recommend the current version of Intype to developers who want a TextMate-like editor for Windows but can't afford to or don't want to pay the US$34.95 price of E.

Intype development appears to have stalled, based on the stale content on the Intype Web site. If the developers ever get their act together to release a product, they intend to charge roughly the same price as E.

More polish required

In conclusion, Rails itself is in a state of flux, and the Rails IDEs are mostly still trying to catch up to the changes introduced on Rails 2.0, much less Rails 2.1. Most of the Rails IDEs discussed in this review package will work well with the current Rails and rake gems with only minor annoyances: The most common annoyance is confusion between RHTML files and HTML.ERB files when generating and navigating to views.

Of course, the next time the Rails core changes, the IDE vendors will have to scramble to keep up, once again.