the development environment is a popular topic among rubyists, and for good reason. the popular options are vi and textmate. each have their advantages. ive toyed with the idea of writing a ruby editor (called red) that is based on curses. a couple days ago i was imagining a distributed editor, ala SubEthaEdit. A database aware editor that showed the SQL columns when you were editing a model.rb. A test aware editor that had a separate window for functionality like zenspider's autotest. A rails  filesystem layout aware editor to make it easy to switch between files in a project.