This post is a follow up to Setting Up a Rails Development Environment On Windows

Probably the best thing about Windows is the sheer amount of software that is available. Given any obscure task, you will have about 300 packages to choose from. The downside to this is that about 295 will be total garbage. There are tools out there to make web development on windows not painful, you just need to know where to look and what to spend money on.

Agent Ransack

Built in windows search is both clunky and slow. We can just use grep, but sometimes having a graphical shell as well is nice to use. This is where Agent Ransack steps in. With decent shell integration (right click on a folder and click "Search with agent ransack") and the sort of features you would expect from a searching app (which includes insanely fast searching), it is a great graphical alternative to grep. I find if I am on the command line already, I will just grep for it. If I am not, or am really not sure what I am looking for, I will agent ransack.

Color Cop

A universal eyedropper is pretty vital for anyone involved in web development. It is something that comes out of the box on OSX, but thankfully, Color Cop is a free option available on windows that gets the job done.

Console2

Not only does windows have pretty much the worst set of commandline apps out there, the terminal emulator it ships with is hands down the worst anyone could possibly come up with. Console2 is better in about a million ways, but shift-drag to select text, and middle click to paste is by itself enough to justify the download.

Process Explorer

From the sysinternals guy, Process Explorer basically lets you walk through process families, and lets you see what files/dlls/registry keys each process has a lock on. On a system without fuser, it is pretty damn vital functionality.

Regex Buddy(39.95$)

This is one tool where I have yet to see the equivilent on any system. While there are plenty of regex tools out there, this one is a cut above, and will pay for itself the first time you need to work with more then a trivial regular expression. Highly recommended

Beyond Compare(30.00$)

This one is available on both windows and linux, but again, is hands down the best merge tool I have ever used. Merging is one of those things that is a real pain, and I have no trouble shelling out 30$ to make my life easier.

WinMerge

If you are too cheap to shell out 30$ for merging, this is the next alternative (what we use at the shop I work at). It will leave you with plenty to be irritated about, but it will get the job done.

Filezilla

FTPing is a fact of life, and you need something decent to get the job done. FileZilla doesn't have some of the fancy features of something like CuteFtp, or the hacking tool appeal of FlashFXP, but honestly, unless you are engaged in illegal activities involving either the transfer of massive files, or the tagging of public ftp sites, I think FileZilla will be enough for the job.

gVim

Here is the funny thing, I very rarely use vim to actually write code in, but I consider it an absolutely essential tool for any developer. There is no better editor for jumping around in text, or applying transformations to code then gvim, and the fact that vim is installed on pretty much every unix machine out there, being comfortable with it is a really great career skill. For me personally, I find the modality of it to be a pain for really long coding sessions, but for some it is really the only way to go. It seems hard to grok at first, but I got fairly proficient in about a week of use.

This is really the topic of another post, but if you decide to go down this road, feel free to grab my windows-ified vim configuration package at http://github.com/mbriggs/vimfiles

E-TextEditor(34.95$)

When I am working on something that doesn't require a massive IDE just to be managable, I like going with a good, lightweight editor. IMO, the best of these is TextMate, but unfortunately, it is OSX only. e is as close as you will get on any other platform, and at 35$ it is a steal.

TextMate has some of the best snippit support out there, and e is compatible with the textmate bundles.

RubyMine(99$)

So, like I said before, when I can get away with it, I would rather just use an editor and a few commandline tools, rather then firing up massive IDEs. There are a few places where IDEs will have a dramatically positive impact on your productivity; for navigating unfamiliar codebases, doing refactoring, and there really is no good replacement for a good visual debugger. If I am doing any of those things, RubyMine is the tool I will reach for.

There are other, solid choices when it comes to ruby IDEs out there, like netbeans or radrails. I have been using JetBrains products pretty much as long as I have been a professional developer though, (IDEa for java, ReSharper for C#, and now RubyMine for ruby), and they consistantly do the best job compared to the competition.