Ever since I have moved to a Mac I have felt like my development environment was a little lacking. Sure, OS X is UNIX, but sometimes there are tools or libraries that I want to use, but won’t compile on a Mac.
Having said that, I don’t know that there is a better text editor than TextMate which is only available on OS X. Enter the best of both worlds…
Recently I decided that I wanted a Linux virtual machine. I initially thought that I would use it for development, but while KDE is really nice, I like OS X more. Then it dawned on me, use a Parallels VM that is identical to my production environment. I can clone the VM and practice upgrading major components prior to migrating production and still maintain a clean copy of the production environment. All the libraries that are on production would be available on the dev VM. I still want to develop with TextMate, so I shared my code folder with the linux server.
That is about perfect.
