

Redcar: It's time for a Ruby editor (in Ruby) [video] - ericb
http://confreaks.net/videos/428-rubyconf2010-it-s-time-for-a-ruby-editor

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ericb
I brought up my desire for a good ruby editor in ruby previously in an HN
comment and got some "why would you want that?" responses. I hope watching
this, people might get a glimpse of why I think this is awesome.

edit: I installed it and it seems pretty nice so far. All it really needs for
me to pledge my undying love is a built-in debugger, and that is on the
roadmap. Oh, and perhaps some git integration (as opposed to SVN).

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thecoffman
I've never understood the desire to have specialized editors for a specific
language. If you want to go to a full blown IDE thats one thing - Eclipse and
Visual Studio are powerful tools - but if you want to _edit_ code efficiently
I don't understand why you wouldn't learn one editor very well and use it for
all languages.

I personally am a vim guy but emacs, textmate, whatever, would be fine and
they all work with clojure, ruby, python, c, and whatever the language du jour
is tomorrow too.

Not that this isn't cool and I don't fault them for scratching a personal itch
- its just an itch I don't have.

~~~
ericb
> I don't understand why you wouldn't learn one editor very well and use it
> for all languages.

If ruby is your preferred language, you could do that with Redcar, and enjoy
the process of extending the editor.

~~~
thecoffman
This is very true and a valid point. If I didn't already know vim it would be
a compelling argument for sure - but as I've already invested the time to
learn it and it supports plugins written in ruby anyways there just isn't
reason enough to switch for me. However - for someone who isn't already
invested in an editor that wants that type of flexibility and wants to write
extensions in ruby - this could very well be a winner!

~~~
ericb
Actually that is the situation I'm in. I was just about to jump into emacs
after working mainly with Netbeans, and failing to make the switch to vim, but
this actually looks really appealing to me.

~~~
sp4rki
You probably tried the no arrows method of switching to Vim. A piece of
advice, just use it. Try to learn a few movements and commands each day as you
need them, but keep using the editor as you used to use any other editor until
you've learned enough of Vim. Baby steps and a week or two into it you will
start to wonder how you lived without it.

~~~
astrofinch
This was not my experience. After a few months of Vim use, I was reasonably
proficient. I timed myself doing basic editing tasks in both Vim (using
keyboard motions) and Gedit (using the mouse). I was significantly faster in
Gedit.

Double-click to select a word, triple-click to select a line. Just start
typing to replace selected text. No conflation of cutting a string in to the
clipboard and deleting it. Click-and-type editing is nice. I only use Vim when
I want to reformat text with its macros.

~~~
sp4rki
I don't mean to be rude or patronizing (it's not my intention at all), but if
you found getting the mouse and triple clicking to select a line instead of
using 'Shift + V', and double clicking to select a word instead of something
like 've', you where probably doing something very wrong. I realize that Vim
is not for everyone, but to say you can be faster than what you could be in
Vim using the mouse and Gedit sounds like total heresy to me! If you told me
that you don't just don't like modal editors or that you where uncomfortable
with the concept of motions and preferred the mouse - that would be the end of
it and I would just acknowledge that (once again) Vim is not for everyone, but
from what I read you never really got to a point where you where proficient
enough with the editor to get significant ease and speed.

I've done the timing also and in some cases I've found that Vim gets me to
where I want to be orders of magnitude faster, but seldom (if not ever) have I
found it to be slower than a regular editor, perhaps with the exception of the
most basic of basic editing needs (and even then Vim is probably faster).

~~~
astrofinch
Yes, but to use those Vim commands your cursor already has to be at the right
place. The main thing that slowed me down with Vim was moving my cursor to the
right place, not executing commands. Having a mouse makes it dead easy to move
your cursor to the right place. I only gave double-clicking and triple-
clicking as examples because I think clicking and dragging to highlight might
be what slows down many click-and-type editor users.

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JonnieCache
I tried an early version, it sucked up entirely too much RAM for an app that
is supposed to be simple. Hundreds of megs. I assume this is down to the JVM +
the JRuby runtime.

As someone wanting 'a better textmate,' I see much more hope in
<http://kodapp.com>, though it isn't cross-platform (it depends on OSX's Cocoa
framework.) The early beta is already very impressive, especially the neatness
of its codebase.

And no, this isn't the place to go recommending (vim|emacs). We get it.

~~~
netghost
Except Kod doesn't really do anything much yet ;) I think we're stuck with
Textmate (which rocks for what it's worth).

~~~
JonnieCache
That's because the devs are mainly interested right now in hacking the text
parser and the associated low level stuff that makes an app really good in the
long run. This is what makes me so hopeful.

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msie
Hmmm, it seems that it runs on JRuby.

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PaulHoule
kinda like the Python IDE in Python that people have been dreaming about as
long as there has been Python?

~~~
DanielRibeiro
However Redcar it is also compatible with texmate bundles. So it is more like
emacs.

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nimms
don't mean to nitpick but textmate bundle support doesn't an emacs make.

redcars extensibility and openness make it more like emacs.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Yes, however the point I was making was more simple: a better emacs, but
respecting what emacs created: texmate. A better texmate, but respecting what
texmate created: redcar. But if you are nitpicking, it is not as simple, and
at this moment it is more like a promise. But you are right that redcar and
emacs have a more similar philosophy.

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Andys
Unfortunately, it depends on jRuby.

~~~
ericb
The install was seamless and keeps that out of your way. Is there some other
(large) objection I'm missing that makes JRuby an issue?

~~~
Andys
Annoying to have such a big new dependency when I'm using Ruby 1.9.2 for
everything else Ruby-related. Would make more sense to me to use a Ruby editor
if it actually ran on the mainstream Ruby interpreter and not jRuby.

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crazydiamond
Has anyone tried the ruby editor (previously called ver) by Michael Fellinger.
It now uses Ruby Tk. I cannot recall the name. (Just tried searching, but
could not find it).

