Hi, I'm Ryan Wilcox. You may know me as a long time freelancer, or as the person behind @bbedit_hints.
I've been programming Rails for the last 3 years. First with TextMate, then with BBEdit. When I moved back to BBEdit I found many of my TextMate Ruby on Rails tools were gone.
So I started building my own tools for BBEdit - sometimes mirrored after the tools I had in TextMate, sometimes mirrored after Vim's Rails.vim mode, and sometimes something better.
This package has clippings for common items, it has refactoring tools, it has tools to help navigate around your Rails project. It has tools to handle Domain Specific Languages in BBEdit (something BBEdit does poorly).
Part of this package assumes you're using my "remove placeholder crap" script, to remove the dross from clippings when you use them.
Not using this already? Check out the BBEdit Hints Blog entry on it!
I really suggest you install the Source BBEdit Package also, as that is meant to provide tools useful in any language or framework.
If you're used to TextMate's Ruby on Rails bundle many things will feel familiar. The nice way additional lines are auto-created in migrations, for example.
I both love the snippets in TextMate, and can't remember syntax worth a darn, so this area probably has the most work done to it.
Rails is opinionated, thus some of the clippings used have opinions behind them.
See Michael Bleigh's blog post on this - and why he moved away from helper_method to before_filter for this.
The private method you implement should just do the find operation for your object: non find operations (index, new, create) aren't repeating themselves enough in a single controller to unify.
There's a filter, the rails_emacs_modeline filter. This filter will create an emacs modeline, which (in addition to enforcing some Rails standard style guidelines on any editor that respects modelines) also will let you use BBEdit's Open Counterpart functionality to open the test/spec for the current file.
Already in a spec or test? Open in Counterpart will open the correct implementation file then: be in model, controller, or whatever.
You'll find a lot about this package that TextMate didn't do - for example, the function menu works in Rake files and schema.rb. (Showing task declarations in the former, and create_table declarations in the latter.)
One failing of BBEdit - at least for Rails development - is that is doesn't support Domain Specific Languages as well as (say) TextMate. It's much harder to extend the Ruby grammer to add a block construct to the function menu.
But, Rails is very DSL based - wouldn't it be great to see our "test" or "it" blocks on the function menu?
For right now the best solution is my "list rspec or shoulda/test uni statements" scripts. This will scan the current file for matching lines (ie: test "logging in") and output them.
Directly underneath each listed declaration is the full path and line number of the statement. Select the path + line number and File -> Open File By Name.
There are also a number of tools to help refactor your code - for example, tools to help you split your code out into ActiveSupport::Concerns. The Text Filters involved will actually create a concern module for you (placing it in the same folder as the current document).
Sometimes you write a line of Ruby code like this:
method_call param_one, param_two
But later you refactor your code a bit and find yourself in a scenario like this:
outer_method_call method_call param_one, param_two
This pattern doesn't make any sense to Ruby (and it doesn't make any sense to humans either). You need to wrap this inner method call in params!
With Wrap Parans Around Parameters you simply select method_call param_one, param_two and BBEdit outputs method_call(param_one, param_two)!
This BBEdit Package includes completion data from both Ruby on Rails and Ruby Standard Library. It's not perfect, but it'll make typing Rails class names easier.
This completion data compliments your own completion data. I've included a script - "CTags for current project window" for you to easily create ctags data for your own project (assuming you don't have another solution).
Ever started typing an object and thinking "what methods can I call on this domain object?"
For example, you have typed survey. and think, "ok, what do I type next?"
You have a Survey class, but app/models/survey.rb only tells you half the story, because the other half lives in schema.rb
And then you have another quarter of the story that may exist in helper methods (who knows)
And maybe you are trying to find the proper *_path method to use to go somewhere. So that's another 10% of the story.
OMG 130% IT'S SO HARD!!!!!
So you're flipping between two or more files.
It sucks.
Now:
- type the name of your variable:
surveyin the above story. You've probably used as a variable name anyway. - Select
availiable_methods_for_selection - Look at the beautiful output!!
Now this has some major limitations:
- It uses ctags (so dynamic magic crap doesn't work). Also you'll need a reasonably up to date tag file.
- It needs a cached copy of your rake routes output (
rake routes > tmp/routes.txt) - It greps
db/schema.rbfor the tableized name and lists the fields. Thus this won't work well with STI entities. - It'll find stuff you're not looking for (crap from controller methods)... but who knows…. maybe you ARE looking for that stuff.
But this is a "20% of the work that solves 80% of the problem" type solution.
This section covers ways to configure BBEdit to make your life easier as a Rails developer.
Textmate's Rails bundle had this cool feature where it would automatically create the down migration steps for your up migration. Ryan's Rails has no such feature, but thankfully Rails now encapsulates all that for us with the change migration method in Rails 3.2+.
However, sometimes you need to write a remove_column. Here's a Search and Replace pattern to do this:
Search Pattern: add_column\W*(:\w+?),\W*(:\w+?),.+
Replace Pattern: remove_column \1, \2
- [TODO]: If I'm in an action I want to go to the view file associated with this
- [TODO]: If I have a
render partial:selected I want to navigate to that partial file - [TODO]: Likewise, the completion data is useful, most of the time. I'd like to improve that.
- [TODO]: More clippings would be helpful too.
- [TODO]: Because of my setup, I don't use scripts that let you fire off rake tasks from your editor, but I understand why should people would want that. I'll leave that up to someone else to implement.
$ cd Library/Application\ Support/BBEdit/
$ mkdir Packages # if it doesn't already exists
$ cd Packages
$ git clone https://github.com/rwilcox/ryans_rails.bbpackage.git
And restart BBEdit.
Please feel free to contribute. However, there is something to keep in mind: BBEdit for some reason doesn't like the uncompiled versions of some Applescripts.
Plus, having BBEdit compile an Applescript every time is much slower than compiling it once.
To avoid this, I've created a ApplescriptSources folder. Modify the .applescript file here, then save a compiled version in the Scripts/git folder.
At some point I'll write a shell script or Makefile to automate this process, or figure out what's wrong...
Public domain
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