[ANN] FXIrb 0.14 - a Win32 GUI wrapper around IRB

[Martin DeMello]

- What?
FXIrb is a simple FXText wrapper around IRB, giving it useful features
like a decent GUI font and cut/paste capability. The current version
is being developed under Windows; I'll look at crossplatform operation
in a later release

- Why?
IRB in the standard Windows terminal is quite painful to use. (The
linux terminal is a lot more capable, which is why I'm concentrating
my development efforts on Windows right now). Thanks to Marco Fraillis
for the initial Windows port, and to Gilles Filippini for starting the
project.

- Where?
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=501

- Now what?
This is a rather alpha release; I'd mostly like people to bang on it
and see what functionality they feel is missing. My current top
priority is multiline editing, but I'm open to feature requests,
suggestions and (particularly!) contributions. If the next version
looks good, I'm going to work with Curt and Laurent and make a proper
FreeRIDE plugin out of it.

martin

 

[Navindra Umanee]

FXIrb is a simple FXText wrapper around IRB, giving it useful features
like a decent GUI font and cut/paste capability. The current version
is being developed under Windows; I'll look at crossplatform operation
in a later release

I have to admit I'm absolutely astonished at the number of people here
who use Ruby on the Windows platform... many of them Ruby experts like
yourself.

I somehow have this image of open source languages like
Perl/Python/Ruby mostly thriving on the Unix platform. I mean sure,
there are Windows ports, but those are usually assumed to be
second-rate.

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised. Windows people have to hack
software too. I would imagine they would prefer more official
development environments with fancy polished GUIs and the such, but
hey why not Ruby.

Cheers,
Navin.

 

[Glenn Parker]

I have to admit I'm absolutely astonished at the number of people here
who use Ruby on the Windows platform... many of them Ruby experts like
yourself.

I somehow have this image of open source languages like
Perl/Python/Ruby mostly thriving on the Unix platform. I mean sure,
there are Windows ports, but those are usually assumed to be
second-rate.

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised. Windows people have to hack
software too. I would imagine they would prefer more official
development environments with fancy polished GUIs and the such, but
hey why not Ruby.

Percentage-wise, there probably aren't that many Ruby coders in the
Windows universe, but the Windows universe is large and vast, so you're
bound to get a few of us. Also, don't assume that only Windows
developers use Windows. I'm a long-time UNIX developer, but I typically
run Windows at home for all the usual banal reasons. Ruby on Windows is
one less reason to dual-boot.

 

[James Britt]

- What?
FXIrb is a simple FXText wrapper around IRB, giving it useful features
like a decent GUI font and cut/paste capability. The current version
is being developed under Windows; I'll look at crossplatform operation
in a later release

- Why?
IRB in the standard Windows terminal is quite painful to use. (The
linux terminal is a lot more capable, which is why I'm concentrating
my development efforts on Windows right now). Thanks to Marco Fraillis
for the initial Windows port, and to Gilles Filippini for starting the
project.

I confess I am not a frequent user of irb; I prefer to use vim and
execute code straight through the editor. But I tend to do a great deal
of mundane work on Win2k using the cmd shell. What features are missing
that you want to put into fxirb?

Or, put another way, what do find so painful about the cmd shell?


Thanks,


James

 

[James Britt]

I have to admit I'm absolutely astonished at the number of people here
who use Ruby on the Windows platform... many of them Ruby experts like
yourself.

I somehow have this image of open source languages like
Perl/Python/Ruby mostly thriving on the Unix platform. I mean sure,
there are Windows ports, but those are usually assumed to be
second-rate.

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised. Windows people have to hack
software too. I would imagine they would prefer more official
development environments with fancy polished GUIs and the such, but
hey why not Ruby.

I really liked Visual Studio back in my VB days, and like (to the small
extent I've used it) the current .net visual studio. (SharpDevelop is
quite slick, too).

But over time I've become a big fan of the command line; I've built up a
library of tools to speed up Google searchs, library queries, TV
schedule searches, Wiki searching/editing, all from the command line.

And Gvim is my editor of choice.

By coincidence this has largely happened since I came across Ruby. Go
figure.

But I've also met a fair number of Windows hackers who also live in cmd
world. I think a certain mindset encourages the migration.


James

 

[Curt Hibbs]

If the next version
looks good, I'm going to work with Curt and Laurent and make a proper
FreeRIDE plugin out of it.

I'm looking forward to it!

Curt

 

[Martin DeMello]

I confess I am not a frequent user of irb; I prefer to use vim and
execute code straight through the editor. But I tend to do a great deal
of mundane work on Win2k using the cmd shell. What features are missing
that you want to put into fxirb?

Or, put another way, what do find so painful about the cmd shell?

Clunky cut/paste is the main one, limited scrollback, occasional
weirdnesses (e.g. my cmd.exe here at home has arrow key support inside
irb, but the one at work, which us *also* win2k, just sends weird escape
sequences). To be fair, I could be subconsciously expecting it to behave
in the familiar xterm way and annoyed that it doesn't - I've never made
very heavy use of it.

martin

 

[Martin DeMello]

I somehow have this image of open source languages like
Perl/Python/Ruby mostly thriving on the Unix platform. I mean sure,
there are Windows ports, but those are usually assumed to be
second-rate.

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised. Windows people have to hack
software too. I would imagine they would prefer more official
development environments with fancy polished GUIs and the such, but
hey why not Ruby.

The windows port of ruby is actually quite excellent, especially with
the one-click installer (thanks to everyone involved with that!).

I'm not too big a fan of the official development environment - we use
it at work, and some parts of it are great (the ability to easily
navigate a multithreaded stack trace, frinstance) while others are just
not to my taste. What I've ended up doing is editing using cygwin and
gvim, with ctags and glark for code navigation, and compiling and
debugging inside the visual studio IDE.

At home I dual boot, but I've been spending most of my time in Windows
lately for one very compelling reason - the fonts. Seriously, it's
easier to set up a unixish environment under windows than it is to get
decent looking small fonts under linux. And as Jamis noted, you can get
a lot accomplished from the command line these days, and ruby
definitely helps with that.

martin

 

[Luc Heinrich]

I have to admit I'm absolutely astonished at the number of people here
who use Ruby on the Windows platform...

I have to admit I'm absolutely astonished at the number of people who
use Windows to begin with

 

[Csaba Henk]

At home I dual boot, but I've been spending most of my time in Windows
lately for one very compelling reason - the fonts. Seriously, it's
easier to set up a unixish environment under windows than it is to get
decent looking small fonts under linux.

That's an interesting POV! Eh, maybe you just bumped into the wrong
distro. Eg., if you boot into Knoppix, that gives you quite a polished
look with nice fonts and transparent menus...

Csaba

 

[Martin DeMello]

That's an interesting POV! Eh, maybe you just bumped into the wrong
distro. Eg., if you boot into Knoppix, that gives you quite a polished
look with nice fonts and transparent menus...

I'm using RedHat FC3 at the moment, but I've been meaning to check out
Debian. Will give it a try in the near future.

martin

 

[martinus]

At home I dual boot, but I've been spending most of my time in
Windows

lately for one very compelling reason - the fonts.

For me it is exactly the other way round. I use an LCD monitor, and I
have to say the XFree's subpixel hinting is far superiour to
Microsoft's implementation, on windows the fonts always look a bit
washy. Oh, and I use the Bitstream fonts wherever possible, they are
really good: http://www.gnome.org/fonts/


martinus

 

[Shashank Date]

Or, put another way, what do find so painful about the cmd shell?

Does code completion work for you on Windows cmd shell? That is one
fetaure I was never able to get to work. I am on Win XP SP2 using the
latest one-click installer.

-- shanko

 

[James Britt]

Does code completion work for you on Windows cmd shell?

Code completion in the cmd shell? Or in irb in the cmd shell?
How would I test this?

James

 

[Tait]

For me it is exactly the other way round. I use an LCD monitor, and I
have to say the XFree's subpixel hinting is far superiour to
Microsoft's implementation, on windows the fonts always look a bit
washy. Oh, and I use the Bitstream fonts wherever possible, they are
really good: http://www.gnome.org/fonts/


martinus

Sometimes the reason the fonts look washy on Windows is that ClearType
isn't set up right. When I had overly fuzzy fonts on my dell LCD at
work, I did some digging around and found out it was due to subpixel
order: default hinting for an R-G-B subpixel order is very wrong on a
B-G-R panel.

If you want to play with it, have a look at
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowerToy.mspx.

Tait

p.s. First post. Hi all.

 

[Matt Mower]

Hi Martin,

- What?
FXIrb is a simple FXText wrapper around IRB, giving it useful features
- Now what?
This is a rather alpha release; I'd mostly like people to bang on it
and see what functionality they feel is missing. My current top
priority is multiline editing, but I'm open to feature requests,
suggestions and (particularly!) contributions. If the next version
looks good, I'm going to work with Curt and Laurent and make a proper
FreeRIDE plugin out of it.

This is great. I am one of those people who seems to get regular
coredumps from Irb because of readline problems so I'll be using this
a lot.

NIce work.

M

 

[Stephen Kellett]

I really liked Visual Studio back in my VB days, and like (to the small
extent I've used it) the current .net visual studio. (SharpDevelop is
quite slick, too).

Blimey, I just don't understand that. Visual Studio 6.0 == very good.
Visual Studio.net == awful, just about everything that was good in 6 was
broken beyond repair and some of it is still not fixed in Visual
Studio.net 2005 beta.

I bet after VB, Ruby is quite a revelation.

And Gvim is my editor of choice.

Thats a vi variant? Ouch.

By coincidence this has largely happened since I came across Ruby.

But I've also met a fair number of Windows hackers who also live in cmd
world. I think a certain mindset encourages the migration.

I'm the opposite way around. I was a die hard Unix guy until I saw Excel
running inside of Word in 1993. Nothing like that could be done in the
Unix world at that time. I didn't move to start using Microsoft stuff
till '96. I still use Linux, but not much, although that will soon
change. I have no time for Linux vs Microsoft OS wars or languages wars.
As time has gone on I'm further away from cmd all the time, but there
are some things I will only do from cmd - I think some things are just
better there and what those things are, they are probably
person-specific.

Stephen

 

[Csaba Henk]

Thats a vi variant? Ouch.

Although I tend to migrate to emacs from vim, I say vim is an excellent
editor. It's just genious how its authors took the vi heritage and
turned it to something what is full of features and one can achieve
efficiency with it within a few hours.

The best illustration for the power of vim is cream, see at
http://cream.sf.net. It's a macro package for vim which turns vim to a
totally end-user-friendly, non-modal editor. When using it, you don't
need to know anything about vi.

Why would the end user want to use cream instead of the hundred other
end-user-friendly editors? Because of one killer feature of vim: the
swapfile. It's a(n almost) real-time saved copy of the actual state of
the edited file's buffer (though "saved copy" is not the most exact
term, as its some kind of binary format), from which you can easily
restore your changes in case of a system/editor crash, and which
silently disappears upon clean exit (no dozens of backup files
polluting your directories, like with emacs).

You could give a try to cream (there is a one-click installer for
Windows), then re-evaluate the "vi variant? ouch" statement.

Csaba

 

[gabriele renzi]

Shashank Date ha scritto:

Does code completion work for you on Windows cmd shell? That is one
fetaure I was never able to get to work. I am on Win XP SP2 using the
latest one-click installer.

it seem to me that thorugh TweakUI I had both command completion and
directpry completion working. But at some time (maybe some hot fix) the
former stopped working for me. Go figure

 

[ab]

Thanks for a great irb-IDE. I'm new to Ruby. We need more user
applications lije this in this language. One problem I have found with
your irb-IDE is that when I use 'gets' e.g. 'name = gets', the IDE
locksup. I changed the method name definitions in the 'fxirb.irb' in 2
places from 'gets' to 'getp' and 'getl' thinking it may be a simple
name conflict with the predefined 'gets' method, but the problem
persists. May be you can fix it in your next release. Keep up the good
work. ab