From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2002-04-05T13:51:21+09:00
Subject: Re: TextPad replacement for Linux?

Julia Becker wrote:
> 
> Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@PATH.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message news:<3CAB5B0B.8155BE5E@path.berkeley.edu>...
...
> > I've been using nedit with ruby for the last year and a half, and have
> > made it comfortable with syntax highlighting and a few macros (search in
> > RAA for nedit).
> >
> > It's got a built in macro language that's kind of like awk. I wish
> > they'd use ruby, which would potentially allow embedding an irb shell,
> > ruby debugger, etc.
> 
> What do you mean with `embedding a debugger'? Nedit is not Emacs with
> built-in everything, Nedit is a Unix application. The built-in macro
> language is dedicated to text editing (since Nedit is a text editor -
> not a debugger or whatever), i.e. searching strings (regular
> expressions), string manipulations,...

Oh, I forgot, Emacs is not a "Unix application", but an OS! :)

I like the Nedit macro language, but is it possible to interact with a
process that's running "ruby -rdebug my_prog.rb", translating keystrokes
in Nedit to debug commands, and hilighting the currently executing line?
I guess that's asking a bit much...

Maybe if we really want visual debugging, we should develop a DDD
module, like was done for Python (hint, hint).

> But Nedit is also prepared to interact with external programs like
> debuggers, compilers or other programming languages (Perl, Tcl/Tk,
> Python, shell scripts, or whatever you like - ruby?)
> 
> This is done with the built-in macro function shell_command() in the
> one direction, and with nc (Nedit client) in the other.

Good point, but that's still not ipc, like I'd need for above. I do use
shell and macro commands to do things like execute the current window
(or selection) in ruby, or pass the file off to rdtool, or apply rd
markup. One of these days I'll parse ruby output for error messages and
jump to the correct line...