Ruby beautifier

Posted by Hosh Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:11:00 GMT

I use jEdit for Ruby on Rails development. I only need three things from it:

  1. Project Viewer / File tree panel (like on TextMate)
  2. Search in directory. The "find" command is OK, but the jEdit HyperSearch will take me directly to the line number in the file.
  3. Autoformatting and autoindenting.

I am not particular to syntax highlighting. I don't need to have integrated SQL, log windows, or Subversion/SVK integration -- I use Tilda, a drop-down Gnome terminal bound to function keys.

jEdit 4.2final does (1) and (2) well. It does not do (3) well. I may get fed up enough to find a new editor soon to work with Ruby on Rails. Now, I can work with the broken autocompletions, but I have difficulty working with the broken autoindents. It looks fine when I see it in jEdit, but the resulting text does not output correctly. Probably because I did not set the indent options properly. Update: Yep, need to set "soft indent" and emulate indents with spaces.

Fortunately, there is a command-line script that will beautify Ruby scripts. It may not work in all the weird cases, but I can bind it to a rake task and apply it to the entire app/ directory.