[ANN] FreeRide 0.9.4 - The Free Ruby IDE

[Laurent Julliard]

Version 0.9.4 of FreeRIDE has been released and is available for download!

For details and downloads, go to:

http://freeride.rubyforge.org/

0.9.4 introduces two major new features that will make you more
productive when you write Ruby code:

- one is the Ruby Documentation plugin which allows you get instant
help on a class or method name whenever yoy hit the F1 button when
writing code (Beware it's terribly addicting...). For this to work
properly, the Linux and the Windows installer now comes with the full
Ruby Documentation generated (ri format)

- second is the "code template" plugin. While typing code press CTRL-J
and you'll see a list of code templates that you can insert by
selecting their short name. These templates cannot be customized for
now but it will come... However we believe there is already a
reasonable list of code templates that you can choose from in 0.9.4

0.9.4 also comes with a number of bug fixes. See the ChangeLog file
for details. Also note that the experimental refactoring plugin has
been deactivated as this was not working very well and the RRB appears
to be no longer maintained.

Have fun! And, as always, feedback and contributions are welcome.

NOTE: If you experience troubles (e.g. crashes) at startup time,
delete your FreeRIDE configuration directory in $HOME/.freeride for
Linux users or %USERPROFILE%\freeride on Windows to restart from a
fresh setting.


=== FreeRIDE Overview ===

FreeRIDE aims to be a full-featured, first-class IDE on a par with
those available for other languages, with all the best-of-breed
features that you would expect in a high-end IDE.

Some of FreeRIDE's features include:

* Multi-file editing
* Syntax highlighting
* Auto-indenting
* Code Folding
* Code Templates
* Source navigation by module, class, method, etc.
* Integrated Ruby Documentation
* Integrated debugging
* Written in Ruby for easy extension

Some planned features include:
* Full internationalization
* High-end refactoring support
* Remote pair programming

In its current state, FreeRIDE cannot yet be called a real IDE
although it is already being used by many Ruby developers. What
is does have is a stable infrastructure with all the working plumbing
needed for the hordes of anxious Ruby developers that want to create
plugins to extend the functionality of FreeRIDE. The FreeRIDE team
will be working on such FreeRIDE plugins that we will individually
release to incrementally improve the FreeRIDE system. Periodically we
will rollup these added plugins into new releases of FreeRIDE.

Even if you have not officially joined the FreeRIDE team you can still
create plugins for you own use, share them with others, or send them
to us and we will make them available for download from our project
wiki. We may even ask for your permission to include them in the
FreeRIDE core distribution.

** IMPORTANT NOTE **
Any help you can provide in testing FreeRIDE, qualifying bugs and (why
not) fixing them is really what we need most, especially on Windows
where FreeRIDE seems to be less robust than on Linux.

Laurent Julliard
Curt Hibbs

 

[Rob .]

Under your list of features you mention "Source navigation by module,
class, method, etc". I was wondering what feature on RIDE does this
description refer to - the Source View panel perhaps?

I'm very impressed by the Ruby Documentation plugin. Great work! I
might cross-pollinate ideas to the jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin. ;-)
Currently v0.5 of the plugin supports a free-text RI search, with a
type-ahead list appearing if the search-term matches more than one
method. Adding the type ahead list of all available documentation
similiar to RIDE would be a nice touch. I'll probably end up writing
code to parse those ri YAML files. Lothar has suggested this before as
a solution for creating a cache of non-Ruby source code classes.

Cheers,
Rob

 

[Curt Hibbs]

Under your list of features you mention "Source navigation by module,
class, method, etc". I was wondering what feature on RIDE does this
description refer to - the Source View panel perhaps?

You are correct, it is the source view panel.

I'm very impressed by the Ruby Documentation plugin. Great work! I

Thanks! As Laurent said, its really addicting once you start using it.

We can't take the credit for it though, this is Martin Ankerl's fxri,
which we integrated into FreeRIDE as a plugin.

Curt

might cross-pollinate ideas to the jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin. ;-)
Currently v0.5 of the plugin supports a free-text RI search, with a
type-ahead list appearing if the search-term matches more than one
method. Adding the type ahead list of all available documentation
similiar to RIDE would be a nice touch. I'll probably end up writing
code to parse those ri YAML files. Lothar has suggested this before as
a solution for creating a cache of non-Ruby source code classes.
Cheers,
Rob