If programming editors are a religion I am an Apostate.
While reading up on Ruby, I came across videos of people writing code real time. First, it is cool Ruby can do high level things in short programs. So short you can watch people coding real time. Second, more apropos, several different presenters were using this cool editor I'd never seen. I thought it was Vim with some crazy programming mode turned on. It completed statements and other coding constructs, speeding up the process of writing code.
This new editor was TextMate. It is a MacOSX app only. It has some simple bourne shell-like extension language. Or you can use any language you like. They come in "Bundles". Bundles exist for every language under the sun. Further Bundles exist for Version control systems. Checkin, checkout, update, branch, whatever. With windows to prompt for commit messages and the like.
The Git bundle allows you to switch branches real time. It even switches the files you have open in the editor. It has full colorization display windows for diffs and commit logs.
I have only scratch the surface of TextMate. You can start using it without having to buy into some IDE monstrosity like Eclipse. From what I can tell it rivals Eclipse or other IDEs for full Web Application development. Apparently it can run a full Web Application stack and support all the languages (Ruby/Python/Perl, HTML, CSS, and Javascript) side by side.
I haven't used it for so involved a dev environment. But I like how it allows you to start small and simple, then build up to the full stack development environment. From what I can tell this applied equally to (Configure, make, C/C++) or (Ant/Maven, Java, SWT) or (Rake, Ruby on Rails, Web) Application stacks.
I am still just playing with simple Project editing. My projects tend to be libraries and Server-side stuff anyways.
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