IRB MacOS X Dashboard Widget

[Gavin Kistner]

Sorry if I got anyone unduly excited - this isn't an announcement of
such a beast.

I want this - I'd love a simple dashboard widget that put IRB always
at my fingertips.

Ooh, and also an ri/rdoc widget, using a Spotlight adaptor.

How sweet would that be?

(Any point in making a *.rb Spotlight adaptor? If nothing else you
could inherit a standard text adaptor and throw 'ruby' into the
keywords, but I wonder if you could do anything more intelligent with
the source code.)

 

[Richard Kilmer]

I totally agree re: dashboard widget. There is a 'system' call in
the dashboard API and wrapping irb should be really straightforward.
Due to prior coding commitments, however, I may not be the first to
get this done ;-)

-rich

 

[Jacob Fugal]

Sorry if I got anyone unduly excited - this isn't an announcement
of such a beast.

I want this - I'd love a simple dashboard widget that put IRB
always at my fingertips.

I totally agree re: dashboard widget. There is a 'system' call in
the dashboard API and wrapping irb should be really straightforward.
Due to prior coding commitments, however, I may not be the first to
get this done ;-)

(Disclaimer: I'm not home to test this on my own OSX)

Wouldn't it be possible to do something like this with QuickSilver[1]?
It'd be sweet to just hit command-space-irb from anywhere and have a
new irb session. No need for the mouse or anything, just five quick
keystrokes...

Jacob Fugal

[1] http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

 

[Mark Hubbart]

While these are both great ideas (I would certainly use one of them ifthey were available) I used another easy way to get IRB moreaccessible.
Just set up a terminal window, change the background color, and hitsave to save a term file. Specify irb as the program to run, and saveto ~/Library/Application Support/Terminal/IRB.term.
Now, using the keyboard prefpane, add a key combo in Terminal for"IRB". "⇧⌘I" isn't taken, so I used that. Also, if you havequicksilver, it will index the Application support folder, andIRB.term will probably come up first on the list when you type "irb";giving another easy access method.
But if anyone makes the dashboard widget, I'll use that
cheers,Mark