I second dekz's encouragement. I went from windows/eclipse to windows/eclipse + cygwin to linux/eclipse to linux/vim(et. al).

It's worth it. It really is. At some point you will marvel that you ever thought it was a good idea to navigate filesystems with the mouse, or edit text in a non-modal editor.

You won't regret it! I'm not sure if I could ever stand windows as a main development environment again. POSIX is just a lovely environment to be in. Once you get the hang of it you'll see you become a lot more faster at mundane tasks (even scripting them). Good Luck!

I use a macbook as my main workstation, but all my development happens in linux VMs. It only takes a few minutes to install a headless ubuntu in VMWare, so I create a new one for every project I start. This has several advantages:

- No configurations/installs from previous projects screwing things up (I know you can use tools like RVM and virtual-env, but in my experience starting from scratch is easier).

- Snapshots. It's great to be able to restore from a snapshot when you bork an upgrade.

- I've become very good at configuring a basic LAMP stack from memory.

Screen+Vim and the ability to suspend/resume machine images makes for an extremely flexible and ubiquitous development environment. I've considered doing this with AWS but there are still odd times where I find myself without an internet connection.

Hey - I like doing this but find the power consumption of my laptop goes through the roof, and it gets uncomfortably warm. Does anyone have any tricks for beating this? I've just upgraded to latest vmware but haven't deliberately tested this yet.