InfiniteRed

A fresh install of Mac OS X to Ruby on Rails, the right way, in a 28 minute screencast.

Many tutorials skip the little steps, causing people to get stuck. This screen-cast starts with a fresh install of Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.8), then goes step by step through the process of setting up a complete development environment for Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

I show you how to setup the following:

• XCode
• TextMate
• iTerm
• DarwinPorts/MacPorts Note: the screencast mentiones DarwinPorts, but it is now MacPorts. This link has been updated
• Ruby
• Ruby Gems
• Ruby on Rails

If you've been learning the command-line and you have the basics down (you should be, as the most effective way to use a computer is a combination of a GUI and command-line), the next step is to customize your environment.

The ability to fully customize your shell is one of the most powerful things about the command-line. It's a dry subject, and mastering it won't get you favors from the opposite sex (although it should), but it can be very useful.

There are many ways to customize your shell, but the first one you should learn is modifying your Bash startup files (assuming your shell is Bash, which is the default in OS X, Linux, and many other unices).

When I first learned how to customize bash, I found an overwhelming amount of information and opinion, which made it difficult. This article is intended to give you the fundamental concepts so that you can create your own startup files, and understand how they work. To give you an example, I go through a subset of my own files, section by section.

To write a command-line application in Ruby is very simple, the following two-line application converts everything in the standard input to upper case and then outputs it:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby 
puts STDIN.read.upcase

Although complete, this is hardly a proper application, which should include options, arguments, help, input error trapping, etc. I've created a skeleton for such a command-line application.

OS X Leopard was released with an updated Terminal application, which now has tabs, window groups, and many other new features. My excitement to replace the often slow iTerm was quickly extinguished as I realized that the new Terminal.app has some glaring problems:

• The first is the inability to set the title of the tab as you do in iTerm, gnome-terminal, etc. That one I can live with, as there are work-arounds.
• The other major problem is the horrible black themes that come with it (bad and worse). Apple is one of those companies who pay very close attention to visual details such as these, so it's surprising that they gave us such horrible choices.

So I decided to make a new theme, based on a subset of my popular TextMate theme IR_Black. The problem is the new Terminal app provides no way to set the ANSI colors; even though you can create your own themes (Settings), you can't change the colors. Ciarán Walsh provides a great solution to this on his blog, which uses the also great SIMBL.

Color Scheme

This color scheme is based off of my popular IR_Black theme for TextMate.

When thinking of vim or vi, visually appealing UI doesn't normally enter your mind. But that isn't due to a lack of features, because its support for syntax coloring is one the best I've seen; the only thing slightly better is TextMate. It's due to the poor color schemes many people use.