I'm a bit late to the party here. This has been a fascinating thread and a great insight into a user's first-time experience with both Ruby and Haml/Sass/Compass. DogBot, I found your original post a genuine laugh out loud read. I think we've all felt like that over the years. I remember trying to work out how to build a form mailer way back in the mid-90's. I'd barely grasped HTML and there I was faced with this mishmash of complex sounding weirdness such as "CGI", "Sendmail", "Perl", "Server Site Scripting"... Ah, I remember the pain well. It took a while, but I got the hang of most of it in the end (not Perl, mind; I ended up using ASP classic, because I found that I was on a Windows server, not Unix.)
So anyway, I'd just like to confirm here that Haml/Sass/Compass and the vast majority of other Ruby tools run absolutely fine on Windows. There is a tendency within the Ruby community to assume a user is on *nix or Mac; it's definitely a scene dominated by non-Windows platforms. But, despite that bias, Ruby works extremely well on Windows, particularly with the new RubyInstaller (see below). You just have to remember to ignore "sudo" when you're confronted with a command like "sudo gem install haml". FYI, sudo is somewhat akin to triggering UAC on Vista/Windows 7; however, you don't need to have admin privileges to install gems on Windows and therefore you can just run "gem install haml" from the command line. I help out with the RubyInstaller project, which aims to provide an easy-to-use and intuitive installer for Ruby on Windows and also improve compatibility. Unfortunately, it's not had a major public release yet. Here's the temporary website: http://rubyinstaller.org/ You may have already used the RubyInstaller, but if you haven't I'd encourage you to try it. It comes with Ruby itself, plus some documentation and a shortcut to the command line you need to run in order to 'access' Ruby. There's also an equally friendly mailing list (linked on the site). Questions specific to Ruby on Windows are always welcomed there, and we especially welcome feedback on the whole RubyInstaller experience. Just be sure to stick to version 1.8 for now. Version 1.9 still has many gems that don't work, so it's best to avoid that for the time being, unless you really know you need it. Regarding editors for Ruby on Windows, I recommend E Text Editor or Notepad++. E is particularly good for working with Sass/Compass/Haml because it has syntax highlighting (called Bundles) you can easily download from within the application. http://e-texteditor.com/ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/ If you want something with more bells and whistles, I've heard good things about RubyMine: http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/ The nice thing about RubyMine is that Sass support is built in, so I think you can just install it and get going. Give me a shout if you need any further Windows specific help. :) Charles
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