Last year, after a friend of mine lent me here Macbook for a week (I want one for myself so bad!), I discovered the most amazing programming software I had ever found, called TextMate. I'm sure many of you have heard about this program. In fact, if you have watched any of the Ruby On Rails screencasts, you know what software I'm talking about. I think it strikes a balance between simplicity and power that's rarely seen, and that I never even thought was possible. I tell you, once you get used to their snippets function, you'll never want to try another IDE again.
So I went off, searching for a nice alternative for Windows that would work similarly. Shockingly enough, there wasn't any program out there that was even similar to TextMate. I thought that was pretty weird. But after doing enough searching, I found a place where some people were making a program for Windows that would basically be a TextMate-like clone for Windows. Unfortunately, the program was only in its initial phase, with no alpha released yet. Sadly, I thought this program would just die out like many other software projects I've seen before, never to see the light of day.
But early this year, I received an E-Mail, stating that the very first Alpha release was available for download! Giddy, I went to their site, and lo-and-behold, there it was. I would finally get to use the program known as Intype. I rarely get excited for a software release, but this was an exception.
So I tried out the program, and it worked fine. Of course, as all alpha software, it had its fair share of bugs, and most of the functionality found in other text editors was missing (more noticeably, an Undo / Redo function). Still, it showed lots of promise, and many other people in their forums shared the same excitement as I did.
After a couple of more releases, there is finally a very usable Alpha version - one with an Undo function - available right now. I've been using it while I'm learning Rails, and it's helped greatly, in terms of writing code much faster. I won't dive into specifics, as there are already a couple of reviews out there in the wild. Even though it's an Alpha release, it's coming along really nicely. If the project continues forward, and all the proposed features are added, this will truly be a blessing for the developers - like myself - that are stuck at work with a Windows environment.
If you have a chance, download the most recent version and give it a spin. Besides helping with bug reports, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised at the current state of the project, and you'll certainly be excited as to where it's headed. Be ready.