@Gordon, I would suggest you start with vim. Vim is much better on windows than emacs and is by far the best editor ever. I am doing a lot of rails now and I cannot expect to work on a better editor than vim. Besides, vim is available on all the platforms. I do not use desert but use moria with line numbers and rails.vim. It is so totally awesome.

I value simplicity in the tools I use and stay a mile away from netbeans or eclipse. Some of the folks here are using Netbeans for Rails Development and it just drives me nuts to code on their machine. I just need my plain vanilla vim and I would be exponentially productive with that. I even use Its All Text extension for firefox and have hooked it up to vim. I am editing this comment in vim. Can your editor do this?

Thats my foamy rabid rant about my tool. Vim FTW.