Redcar: It's time for a Ruby editor (in Ruby) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Redcar: It's time for a Ruby editor (in Ruby) [video]

confreaks.net

42 pointsericb27 comments

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).

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.

> 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.

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!

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.

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.

I'll throw myself in as a datapoint here: I'm using vim exclusively for over 10 years and I still use the arrow keys to move around.

I just like it that way and never had a reason to re-train myself.

Don't force yourself into "best practices" needlessly. Find the way that works best for you - and get hacking!

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.

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).

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.

I agree. I've never had the need to have an IDE for a specific language. I'm also a Vim guy, and though I've tried enough IDE's for a lifetime, I found the best IDE (for me at least) is a command line and Vim.

I think it's not that it's an IDE for a specific language, but an IDE written in a language that a lot of people would like to hack around in. So the value is in being able to write plugins or what not in ruby.

That being said, I haven't used it for anything more than peeking at it.

I love Eclipse. I get by with vim and gedit, but I prefer to have all the tools that Eclipse encompasses.

That being said, I have tried the dynamic languages plugin in Eclipse for Scala/Ruby/Python as well as PyDev and the performance is atrocious.

So if Redcar can be half as good as Eclipse, then I'm all for it.

> I've never understood the desire to...

My friend drives me crazy whenever he uses that phrase. He says stuff like: "I've never understood why people like kettle chips." - while I'm eating kettle chips! Sounds condescending. Yes, I am crazy for eating kettle chips. I make no sense whatsoever.

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.

> it sucked up entirely too much RAM for an app that is supposed to be simple. Hundreds of megs.

I show 175 megs of Real Memory used on OS X at the moment for Redcar. So still not "small," but since development is the primary focus of my machine, it doesn't bother me at all, especially considering firefox is at 241 megs at the moment.

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

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.

Hmmm, it seems that it runs on JRuby.

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

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

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

redcars extensibility and openness make it more like emacs.

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.

Unfortunately, it depends on jRuby.

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?

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.

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).

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