Part of the challenge/reward for a Rails developer is learning the mental model that goes with the framework. It helps you to attack new problems using the tools that the framework provides. Using an IDE makes it very easy to do the (relatively few) things that the IDE developers have given you to work with, and nearly impossible to discover anything outside of those boundaries.
Working directly with the code and the terminal gives you a hands-on appreciation for what you are doing. Looking up the correct approach in Rails Guides or another documentation source will return answers that presume that you will be typing commands into terminal or writing code directly into your text editor.
Virtually none of the answers you will find on this list or on the Web will tell you which menu structure to look through in your IDE to find the command to accomplish your goals, and you'll be on your own trying to reverse-engineer what is actually a definitive and accurate answer to your question in order to slot it into your IDE's world-view.
If you're stuck on Windows, choose a text editor that supports viewing an entire tree of files. On the PC, the closest I have seen to TextMate is UltraEdit (I don't make it over to the distaff side all that much, so there's probably something newer and better these days.) Also be sure that your editor supports context-specific code highlighting, so you can spot errors like mis-matched quotation marks and braces without having to run the code.
Many, if not most Rails devs use TextMate*, Terminal, and a browser to do their work. Many, if not most Rails devs are highly productive with this combination of tools. There have been several attempts to build (or adapt) a Rails IDE, yet none of them have found traction in the marketplace to the extent that they have supplanted the established workflow. I'm not saying that this is universally true, or will always be true, but it takes a qualitative difference on the order of DOS vs. Mac to disrupt an established workflow, and until such a disruptive force arrives, and drags the entire ecosystem along with it (kicking and screaming and decrying the newcomer as a "toy") you're probably going to be relatively on your own.
Walter
* Or the local equivalent.
