Dr Nic

My son Banjo’s 13th week birthday today, yet he bought me this great t-shirt. I guess I’ll have to save it for him til he’s big enough to wear it.

Note: background for Banjo’s name is on previous post.

One my very early posts (3 months ago) might be useful to RadRailers if you haven’t already seen it: how to make RadRails text editors look like TextMate.

Its full of updates, comments and demos.

ase => assert_equal(expected, actual)
asn => assert_nil(instance)
asm => assert_match(/expected_pattern/, actual_string)

I’d been using Corban Brook’s templates but they didn’t include any assert or migration templates. And I wanted them without having to spend $3049 on TextMate [1]

This made me cranky

Solution 1: Learn Emacs. Setting up Emacs with all the modules you’ll need is a non-trival exercise. That is, put aside a day or so and don’t expect to be finished when time runs out. Plus, a version of GNU Emacs for Windows hasn’t been released since 2005. Not a lot of OSS love there.

Solution 2: Offer to build Textmate for Windows. I’m sure I read once that the Textmate author was open to porting of Textmate to Windows. That must be the past, because their website claims very strongly that there will never be a port:

countless requests for both a Windows and Linux port, but TextMate remains exclusive for the Mac, and that is how we like it!

That’s just lazy if you ask me.

Solution 3: Port Textmate’s snippet libraries (bundles) over to RadRails. Textmate has a more powerful syntax for its snippets than RadRails has for its templates (a limitation inherited from Eclipse), but SUCCESS! On the 31st of October - the day when Textmate was lauded around the blogosphere for its Halloween theme, I ported all their snippets into RadRails. OoooOOOOHHH spooooky.

You can now access the latest and greatest in templates/snippets for Radrails, for Ruby/Rails and RHTML (or click on the yellow boxes at the top).

Installation

1. Download the two template XML files.
2. Open RadRails
3. Go to Windows > Preferences > Ruby > Editor > Templates, to see the list of included templates
4. Click on any template, and press Ctrl-A to select them all.
5. Click on Remove, to delete them all
6. Click Import…, select the file ruby-rr-templates.xml
7. Change to Rails > Editiors > RHTML Editor > RHTML Templates
8. Remove all the current templates
9. Click Import…, select the file rhtml-rr-templates.xml
10. Press Ok to close the dialog and you’re done

Too difficult? The next release of RadRails will include these new templates.

How to use templates/snippets?

You can peruse a textmate-snippets-cheat-sheet, but really, spend 20 minutes looking through the template lists in RadRails. The name of the template is the text you type into the editor to activate the template.

So, the name of assert_equals is ase. So, type ase and press CTRL-SPACE, and a list of options pops up. Press return on the selected option.

Want to see all available assert_* templates? Type as and CTRL-SPACE and there they are. Nifty.

Patching/Updating

The RadRails guys are going to host these templates to allow anonymous access to make submitting patches relatively easy (if you know how to wield SVN). In future perhaps there will be a nice website for collaboratively sharing and downloading updates to templates.

Templates for JavaScript and CSS

I’ve put in a request for adding template support for JS and CSS as I have ported the JavaScript+CSS bundles as well. We just need a UI to import them into RadRails.

[1] TextMate is 39 euros = $49 at the moment. Plus $3000 for a new Mac.