From: Ruben <Ruben.Vandeginste@...>
Date: 2004-05-14T21:11:40+09:00
Subject: Re: are there any ruby IDEs?


At Fri, 14 May 2004 06:34:04 +0900,
Kristof Bastiaensen wrote:
> 
> That's interesting, I will also take a look at it.
> Are there other packages that are commonly used by
> emacs programmers?

Do you know http://www.emacswiki.org ?  You can find a lot of
information and pointers to emacs-lisp code there. Some packages that
i've looked at and seem interesting (allthough not directly related to
ruby), are JDEE (Java Development Environment for Emacs), ECB (Emacs
Code Browser), Flymake, color-theme.

> What I am missing is a way to execute code inside
> a emacs session, like *scratch* for elisp.

You can start a shell inside emacs (M-x eshell), most of the time
however, i do this (executing code, not ruby specific) in a seperate
xterm. Debugging on the other hand (C-code), i always do with gdb
inside emacs (M-x gdb), it is nice because emacs will show you where
you are in the source, and you have the source right there when you
want to make changes. (you can do something similar with 'M-x rubydb',
but i've never really used that yet, only tested)

Actually you can also start compiles (with 'make') from inside emacs
(M-x compile). Emacs will show the output of make in a seperate
buffer. If there are errors, you just have to click/enter on the error
and it will 'warp' you to the source at the location of the error.

> I am currently using irb, but many times I am entering
> multiline code in irb, just to find out I made a mistake
> and have to retype it.

The elisp-files you get for ruby support in emacs also contain
'inf-ruby.el'. If you load this, then you can run irb inside emacs
(M-x run-ruby).  There are functions defined so that you can mark
something in your source-file and 'send' that code to the running
irb-process (ruby-send-region/ruby-send-region-and-go). You might take
a look at 'inf-ruby.el'. To be honest i haven't used this a lot, but
most of my programming work is in C.  You might also look into
'rubydb3x.el'.

> Another nice thing would be a class browser, where you could browse by
> method and class, in stead of by file (a la smalltalk).

Maybe you should take a look at ECB (Emacs Code Browser,
http://ecb.sourceforge.net), this probably does what you want. It
doesn't support Ruby though, AFAIK :(. (it supports C/C++, Java and
even Python...)  Personally, i've used it a couple of times, but most
of the time i don't. Things like this always seem to take up too much
screen space, and i really want to see as much code as possible at
once.

> If you are interested, I find the following replacements
> very useful.  
> 
> Replacement for kill-line,
> basicly it either preserves indentation, or removes all
> whitespace, not just mess it up.
> 
> (defun my-kill-line (&optional arg)
>   ...)

hmm.. maybe i'm doing something wrong, but this seems to act the same
as normal kill-line ?  are you using Xemacs, or Emacs ?

> replacement for beginning-of-line,
> (this seems to be standard in most editors):

i'm afraid i'm the kind who doesn't like this behaviour, but thanks
anyway :)

Ruben