Consistency makes code easier to read. Long-lived projects can be a wildly inconsistent in their ruby hash syntax, so here is a quick way of upgrading all symbol-based hash-keys to the new leaner format. Simply put: perform the below operation to convert :thing => 'value' to thing: 'value' in one easy step.

Please remember to commit everything first so you have a clean slate to start out from, and undo is easy.

In Sublime Text, open Find | Find in Files... and enter:

Search:   ([^:]):([^:\s=]+)\b\s*=>\s*
Replace:  \1\2:

Ensure the Regular Expression mode is active (the button looks like: .*). Now is a good time to use the File | Save All action.

Remember to double-check everything looks just right. I recommend using git add --patch . for this, because that way you can easily skip any changes you might not agree with.

This is just a minor detail in the overall readability and consistency of a project, but even minor details matter when it comes to long-term ease of maintainance.

Update 2015: Rubocop can easily fix this minor issue and also automatically fix quite a few other inconsistencies. Highly recommended.