Ruby Editor

[Dan Zwell]

I'm not sure that tracks. You consider Emacs to be more customizable
because all the plugins are written in Elisp, but you consider Vim less
customizable because you have to know vimscript to write plugins. Am I
reading what you're saying correctly?

So . . . how are those two things different from one another?

(leaving aside for the moment the ability to write significant chunks of
plugin code in other languages -- which I think is present in both, but
more obvious and common with Vim)

My theory: forcing writers of plugins to write in one language has the
side effect of creating a community of developers that can all
understand each other's work, for the most part. These best of these
plugins are more likely to be accepted into the core of the editor,
because they are already in the "preferred scripting language".

What I know: I have had an easier time setting up functions that do more
powerful things, because everything in Emacs seems to be based on
functions, and they can always be modified it one of a few ways (change
a variable, add a hook, or redefine a function). Maybe it's just that I
like elisp better than vimscript.

Dan

 

[John Joyce]

It is the only means to assure persistence, if X who has the copyright
of TextMate decides that there will be no more TextMate, than there
will be no more TextMate.
Hopefully that will never happen but it is a legal fact.
That is the only point I wanted to make.

Robert

--

Big Deal!
If X who has ownership of the software decides to axe it, then X axes
it!
That's life. Not a problem. Use what you like and can use. If it
becomes unavailable or outdated, then so be it.
What software doesn't eventually either get updated or outdated?
Neither is a reason not to use something.

 

[Chad Perrin]

To me, viability and energy of the development team are more important
than whether I can hack on the source or not, except for software in
very specialized areas. For example, there are a lot of Petri net
analysis and modeling packages out there that are freely available to
the academic community in source form but not for commercial users.

For the most part, whether or not *I personally* can "hack on the source"
is secondary to many of the other benefits of open source software, since
I personally don't even see any of the source of about 98% of the open
source software I use. For instance, I've never seen the source of GCC,
and maybe I never will (though I'm trying to find the time to contribute
to another open source C/C++ compiler project). It still has benefits
due simply to its status as an open source project that are not shared
by, say, the Microsoft C/C++ compiler.

I'd like to hack on such stuff, but I can't. But I *don't* want to hack
on an IDE, or a word processor, or a browser. In those cases, open
source only means I probably don't have to pay for it and I return the
favor by filing bug reports rather than trashing them in my blog. * I
want IDEs and browsers and word processors that do my bidding and make
easier hacking on the stuff I want to hack on.

That's a pretty clear indication of one of the benefits: unlike with
something such as Visual Studio, you could file a bug report with the
developers of an open source IDE (like Camelia, Eclipse, or KDevelop, as
examples) and actually have some reasonable expectation it'll make a
difference. I prefer software that gets fixed in response to complaints
from users over software that just gets a bunch of unnecessary -- and,
often enough, annoying -- new misfeatures with the next release.

Not all closed source software suffers that fate, of course, but unlike
the case of open source software, if the developers start behaving badly
with proprietary software you can't just fork it (or hope someone else
will do so).

* Except for Firefox and OpenOffice -- those I *have* trashed in my blog.

OpenOffice.org's only problem is that it's an office suite. There's no
such thing as a good "office suite".

Firefox, alas, is the best of a tremendously bad breed. I wish there was
something better out there, and I've toyed with the idea of creating a
GUI web browser of my own just so I won't have to suffer with what's
currently available, but it's going to have to wait on me having more
free time. Lots more.

 

[Chad Perrin]

Big Deal!
If X who has ownership of the software decides to axe it, then X axes
it!
That's life. Not a problem. Use what you like and can use. If it
becomes unavailable or outdated, then so be it.
What software doesn't eventually either get updated or outdated?
Neither is a reason not to use something.

Nobody was talking about what X is or is not allowed to do -- only the
fact that it's really annoying to have a useful piece of software vanish
while one still wants to use it.

The point isn't that TextMate might get updated or outdated, but that it
might become unavailable while still up-to-date, or may become outdated
specifically because the copyright holder decides we don't get updates
any longer.

 

[Chad Perrin]

My theory: forcing writers of plugins to write in one language has the
side effect of creating a community of developers that can all
understand each other's work, for the most part. These best of these
plugins are more likely to be accepted into the core of the editor,
because they are already in the "preferred scripting language".

What I know: I have had an easier time setting up functions that do more
powerful things, because everything in Emacs seems to be based on
functions, and they can always be modified it one of a few ways (change
a variable, add a hook, or redefine a function). Maybe it's just that I
like elisp better than vimscript.

I think we may have to simply agree to disagree on the subject of
additional languages for plugin writing. I tend to subscribe more to the
TIMTOWTDI principle of Perl than the TOORWTDI principle of Python.

 

[Chad Perrin]

I think emacs is more customizable for one simple reason: vmlinux.el.

Emacs is an operating system in which someone wrote a popular programmer's
editor. Vim is an extensible editor.

I already have an OS. I don't need to run another one on top of it.

The way I've heard the same sentiment phrased was "Emacs is a great OS.
Now someone needs to write a good editor for it."

Of course, there is a good editor for Emacs. I think it's called Viper.

(Me, I use nvi. It's not especially extensible, but then, I don't need to
extend it; it does what I want and stays out of my face.)

I don't actually use extension in Vim, either, really. I guess you could
call the syntax highlighting files for Vim extensions, though -- and I do
use those.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Firefox, alas, is the best of a tremendously bad breed. I wish there was
something better out there, and I've toyed with the idea of creating a
GUI web browser of my own just so I won't have to suffer with what's
currently available, but it's going to have to wait on me having more
free time. Lots more.

Well ... I switched to Seamonkey. Pretty much all the Linux browsers use
the same Gecko rendering engine and have a similar look and feel. If you
can stand KDE, Konqueror is probably as good as Firefox now.

What ever happened to the browser that Sun used to ship with Java as a
demo? Is that still around? I liked that one.

 

[Robert Dober]

Big Deal!
If X who has ownership of the software decides to axe it, then X axes
it!
That's life. Not a problem. Use what you like and can use. If it
becomes unavailable or outdated, then so be it.
What software doesn't eventually either get updated or outdated?
Neither is a reason not to use something.

I might have expressed myself imprecisely AAMOF Chad understood
completely what I meant and his given the correct answsers concerning
this already.
As for being DRY I will not answer therefore .

Robert

 

[Chad Perrin]

Well ... I switched to Seamonkey. Pretty much all the Linux browsers use
the same Gecko rendering engine and have a similar look and feel. If you
can stand KDE, Konqueror is probably as good as Firefox now.

I find the interface for Konqueror kludgey and annoying, to say nothing
of the fact that I pretty much *can't* stand KDE. I haven't given
Seamonkey a try -- but I do know that I found its predecessor, the
Mozilla suite, thoroughly aggravating. I hear things have improved at
least a little, though.

What ever happened to the browser that Sun used to ship with Java as a
demo? Is that still around? I liked that one.

I have no idea.

 

[aks]

I deeply respect Vim. I am convinced that there is no more elegant way

to do simple or complex manipulation of text/code. However, learning
These two editors have a steep learning curve, if you want to use them
effectively. (Don't bother trying, otherwise.) I would think that Vim is
a little better for beginners, because it will force you to learn
without being overly difficult. It is too easy to use Emacs without
learning about its advanced features, and that would be a waste.

Apologies for continuing the "off-topic" replies to the original
question about how to best use TextMate for editing Ruby programs..
but ..

In regard to "vi" vs. "emacs", it doesn't have to be "either - or": I
use "viper" within Emacs and get the best of both worlds.

IMHO, the strength of "vi" ("vim", "nvi", etc.) are that it is the
best at "word processing" -- editing chunks of text, with a minimum of
keyboard input, and without having to use a mouse. While, in
contrast, the strength of "emacs" is that it can easily be extended in
very useful ways to accomplish things that are not normally
accomplished within an "editor". For example, take a look at "orgtbl-
mode.el", "table.el", "calendar.el", and, most amazingly, the
"calculator.el" mode.

Of course "vi" (and it's clones) are also customizable, and amazing
extensions have been built for them, but there is an order of
magnitude of difference between those of "vi" and those of "emacs" --
the latter of which have a depth that those of the former would have
to work very hard indeed to match.

In any case, with "viper" you can have both worlds: the best of vi's
superior editing keystrokes with the platformed extensibility of
emacs.

Finally, to bring this back to ruby, in the standard Emacs "site-lisp"
directory, I find these extensions for Ruby: inf-ruby.el, ruby-
electric.el, ruby-mode.el. The first one supports doing real-time
evaluation of ruby expressions within an "inferior" process. The
"electric" mode supports dynamic insertion of ruby syntactic elements
as a convenience to the programmer, and the last is the basic mode for
editing ruby programs -- which supports things like indention/
exdention, face-control for syntactic elements, etc.

The reason I bring these modules up is that, if you are concerned (as
some previously have stated) with the viability of your editing
environment, and consider TextMate not suitable because you don't
trust that their development will support their product as long as you
want to develop using it, then you may wish to consider using either a
vi clone with a ruby extension, or Emacs with these standard ruby
modules, or Emacs with these ruby modules AND viper-mode. Both vi and
emacs (not the extensions) are open-source, and have been around
longer than most of you (but not me -- I started writing assembly code
on Univac mainframes in the early 70s, before Emacs was even a glimmer
in Stallman's eyes

Now, perhaps we can discuss Ruby stuff again.. ;-)

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I find the interface for Konqueror kludgey and annoying, to say nothing
of the fact that I pretty much *can't* stand KDE.

Likewise ... that's why I bought Komodo.

I haven't given
Seamonkey a try -- but I do know that I found its predecessor, the
Mozilla suite, thoroughly aggravating. I hear things have improved at
least a little, though.

Seamonkey is pretty much equivalent to Thunderbird as an email client,
and a tad less than Firefox as a browser. The only thing I know that it
*won't* do is RSS feeds -- for that you need Firefox. I don't use the
composer and I have better IRC clients, but "Chatzilla" is usable as an
IRC client.

 

[Bira]

Hi,

Am Samstag, 21. Jul 2007, 07:50:00 +0900 schrieb alex_land:

[...] regarding the editors of choice.

I suppose myself to be the most critical Vim user abroad.
I sure took long to accept Vim as a software to be at least installed.
I deeply recommend to use and getting used to Vim.

Bertram

For what it's worth, I run Linux and currently use Cream as my editor
of choice. Before that, it was Scite.

Cream is actually a special configuration for GVim, which makes its
interface look more like that of other text editors (menus, mice, and
real-time editing), so you can have most of the power without so much
of a learning curve. It has very nice syntax highlighting, and I love
the fact that you can configure it to show a black background and
white text.

 

[Chad Perrin]

Likewise ... that's why I bought Komodo.

Seamonkey is pretty much equivalent to Thunderbird as an email client,
and a tad less than Firefox as a browser. The only thing I know that it
*won't* do is RSS feeds -- for that you need Firefox. I don't use the
composer and I have better IRC clients, but "Chatzilla" is usable as an
IRC client.

That's really my biggest problem with something like Seamonkey -- most of
it, I wouldn't use. I have mutt, irssi, and Google Reader for things
like email, IRC, and feed aggregation. All I need out of my browser is a
browser.

 

[Chad Perrin]

IMHO, the strength of "vi" ("vim", "nvi", etc.) are that it is the
best at "word processing" -- editing chunks of text, with a minimum of
keyboard input, and without having to use a mouse. While, in
contrast, the strength of "emacs" is that it can easily be extended in
very useful ways to accomplish things that are not normally
accomplished within an "editor". For example, take a look at "orgtbl-
mode.el", "table.el", "calendar.el", and, most amazingly, the
"calculator.el" mode.

For such things, I tend to use other tools. I want my text processor for
processing text, and other tools for other purposes. For instance, I use
irb as my calculator.

The reason I bring these modules up is that, if you are concerned (as
some previously have stated) with the viability of your editing
environment, and consider TextMate not suitable because you don't
trust that their development will support their product as long as you
want to develop using it, then you may wish to consider using either a
vi clone with a ruby extension, or Emacs with these standard ruby
modules, or Emacs with these ruby modules AND viper-mode. Both vi and
emacs (not the extensions) are open-source, and have been around
longer than most of you (but not me -- I started writing assembly code
on Univac mainframes in the early 70s, before Emacs was even a glimmer
in Stallman's eyes

I was around before both -- though, admittedly, I wasn't programming yet.

Now, perhaps we can discuss Ruby stuff again.. ;-)

See above, re: irb instead of emacs as my calculator.

 

[Chad Perrin]

For what it's worth, I run Linux and currently use Cream as my editor
of choice. Before that, it was Scite.

SciTE is still my favorite GUI editor. Vim is still my favorite editor,
period.

Cream is actually a special configuration for GVim, which makes its
interface look more like that of other text editors (menus, mice, and
real-time editing), so you can have most of the power without so much
of a learning curve. It has very nice syntax highlighting, and I love
the fact that you can configure it to show a black background and
white text.

I prefer to avoid hiding the power of Vim behind a point-and-click
facade. My opinion is my own, of course.

 

[John Joyce]

Firefox, alas, is the best of a tremendously bad breed. I wish
there was
something better out there, and I've toyed with the idea of creating a
GUI web browser of my own just so I won't have to suffer with what's
currently available, but it's going to have to wait on me having more
free time. Lots more.

WebKit is wide open source, and it is what is used by Safari and
Konqueror/KHTML...

As for the OSS issue, I'm in no way against it. I totally support it.
But I also understand the indie devs' need to make a living without
suffering a corporation's suckiness. I just use what works best for me.

TextMate by the way, has a VERY kind license, a very dedicated
developer who also responds to individual users directly. I defend
their choice not to open their source yet because their revenue has
kept them providing quality stuff. In their case, with such a widely
popular app that is already being aped everywhere, if they had opened
the source, they'd be out of business. So how would they make a living?

Not everything needs to be OSS. It does have merits and makes sense
in many regards, but the question often remains of how do you make a
living if everything is open source without others blindly taking
what you made?

Rails is open source, but BaseCamp (which is pretty impressive but
pretty expensive) is not.

 

[Chad Perrin]

WebKit is wide open source, and it is what is used by Safari and
Konqueror/KHTML...

As for the OSS issue, I'm in no way against it. I totally support it.
But I also understand the indie devs' need to make a living without
suffering a corporation's suckiness. I just use what works best for me.

TextMate by the way, has a VERY kind license, a very dedicated
developer who also responds to individual users directly. I defend
their choice not to open their source yet because their revenue has
kept them providing quality stuff. In their case, with such a widely
popular app that is already being aped everywhere, if they had opened
the source, they'd be out of business. So how would they make a living?

Not everything needs to be OSS. It does have merits and makes sense
in many regards, but the question often remains of how do you make a
living if everything is open source without others blindly taking
what you made?

There are other business models than the governmentally enforced
artificial scarcity model where software is treated as physical product
units.

 

[bgulian]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 11:05:09AM +0900, John Joyce wrote:

There are other business models than the governmentally enforced
artificial scarcity model where software is treated as physical product
units.

What would those business models be? And are they so complex that the
developer must spend a great deal of time devising and testing them
rather than developing software? I am tremendously grateful for OSS
but I have yet to figure it out. It seems that most of it is based on
some sort of patronage which is no business model at all.

 

[Leonard Chin]

TextMate's big weakness is with non-western languages. Japanese for
example. It can display the characters (if they're in the font you
are using) but things go crazy when you use the Kotoeri input system.
This is why in Japan many Rubyists are using Jedit or something.

Textmate actually can handle the display and input of Japanese text
with the appropriate font for the former, and Hetima's Japanese CJK
input plugin.
http://hetima.com/textmate/index-e.html
I have found it to work well enough with a number of different input
method editors, including Kotoeri.

Nonetheless, there aren't all that many Textmate users in Japan -
though they do exist. Most (hardcore) rubyists in Japan seem to be
emacs/vim users, with a bias towards emacs. There are also a bunch who
use editors such as Hidemaru, RDT/Eclipse, and JEdit (as you
mentioned).

An interesting data-point to note is that most of the ruby core team
seems to prefer emacs, whereas most of the rails core team seems to
prefer Textmate.

 

[Alex Young]

What would those business models be? And are they so complex that the
developer must spend a great deal of time devising and testing them
rather than developing software? I am tremendously grateful for OSS
but I have yet to figure it out. It seems that most of it is based on
some sort of patronage which is no business model at all.

There are quite a few different ones. For example, free the software,
charge for service. It seems to work for (at least) Red Hat and MySQL.
Then you've got bigger companies (like IBM) who see the benefit of
expanding the market or promoting an open standard on top of which they
then sell a closed-source product. Then there are companies like Neuros
(http://www.neurosaudio.com/) who use open software to sell hardware.
You could argue that Apple have partially done this with OS X and the
tools that are distributed with it, but that relationship is more
tenuous. Then you've got software that's so important that the body
behind it can survive on donations (Mozilla and Apache, to the best of
my knowledge, work this way).

Those are just off the top of my head - I'm sure there are others.