RubyBuntu -6- gedit 3! wtf? set it up for ruby/web development :)

So you’ve installed (or upgraded to) ubuntu 11.10 and everything looks great… Except – uh!, lots of gedit plugins are only compatible with gedit 2! But don’t be sad.. or angry.. This guide points out, how to, nevertheless, create a solid foundation that allows you getting prodcutive with gedit!

Setting up gedit, the slim and powerful, pretty and fast, flexible and stable code editor ;)

This guide assumes an ubuntu 11.10(gnome shell) system, but will also work for similar variants (Btw, what’s the first thing you should adjust in a new ubuntu system? Change the gnome theme to radiance!).

Aside from that, you should already have installed ruby and git (sudo apt-get install git-core). If you still use GNOME 2/gedit 2, please use this previous article instead.

Scaffold

Firstly, ensure that you’ve got the official gedit-plugins package:

sudo apt-get install gedit-plugins

Besides this official package, I usually recommend installing the gedit-gmate package. However, one disadvantage is that plugins get not stored in the default user plugin directory. Moreover, it comes with an extra Ruby language specification for Ruby files in Rails, so editing Ruby files can lead to different colorizations, which is quite confusing. Nevertheless, gmate comes with lots of useful additions that will be used below.

On the other hand, I’ve started to improve the Ruby (and related) gedit configurations and called this rubybuntu-gedit. It’s not finished, yet, but already includes better Ruby specifications. Still, it does not include other web-related language definitions, but gmate has them! In some folder, clone the gmate repo:

git clone https://github.com/gmate/gmate

Copy the files from gmate/lang-specs to /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs:

sudo cp gmate/lang-specs/*.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs

Next up, install the rubybuntu-gedit gem. It will copy more language files to the above folder, delete the rails and rhtml files and set some gnome mime types (install as sudo when prompted):

gem install rubybuntu-gedit
rubybuntu-gedit install -3

After these steps, gedit can speak languages like Ruby 1.9, Sass, Haml, Cucumber, Gemfile.lock etc. ;)

Settings

Now, start gedit!

Here are some recommendations for the basic settings at the Edit/Preferences dialog:

Under the Font & Colors tab, you have to either select the RubyBuntuOne or the RubyBuntuTwo theme to use the enhanced language specifications from above.

The redundant toolbar can be deactivated in the View menu. The default shortcut for toggling the bottom- and sidebars is (<Ctrl>+)<F9>.

Hot hot keys

Before getting into the plugins, let me highlight that good shortcuts for good features are very important. What is the use of a plugin that you do not use, because you always forget how to use it?

ubuntu/gnome offers a nice way to change menu shortcuts: The global Editable menu shortcuts setting. It allows you to change a shortcut of a menu item by moving the mouse over the item and pressing the desired shortcut.

Unfortunately, it has disappeared in ubuntu 10.4 from the appearance settings. But it is not lost, it is just hidden. You can get it back in GNOME 3 with the gsettings command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface can-change-accels true

And while we’re on it, let’s also improve the way the home key works in gedit (should jump to the first char, instead of the absolute beginning of a line):

gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.editor smart-home-end before

Plugins

Installing gedit plugins is quite easy. Just place the downloaded files of a plugin at: ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins/. Pay attention that the .plugin file must lay exactly in the directory. In most cases, it comes with an additional .py file and/or a folder named after the plugin. Plugins can be activated at Edit/Preferences/Plugins.

Below is a list of plugins I use, ordered by subjective importance. Every plugin without a download link is available in the official plugin package or in gmate(gedit3). I’ve alse added a shortcut suggestion for some of them.

Snap open

Code comment

Advanced Find/Replace

Snippets

Word completion

Draw Spaces

External Tools

#!/bin/sh
ruby

Smart Highlight

Pair Character Completion

Color Picker

Open URI Context Menu

Embedded Terminal

Regex Search and Replace

I miss my gedit 2 plugins!!!11

This list is definitely shorter than the one for gedit 2, many plugins are not ported, yet. For example, I haven’t found a replacement for these ones:

• Smart Indent
• TODO List
• Rails Extract Partials

In addition, I miss an indent plugin that allows you to (un)indent using <Alt> and the arrow keys. Although gtksourceview (which is a part of gedit) offers indenting using (<Shift>)<Tab>, it’s absolutely not satisfying when trying to indent single lines.

I will update this post with new gedit 3 compatible plugins that I’ll use (or maybe write). New plugins can also be found at:

• the official wiki
• the gmate repository

Rails Footnotes

Last but not least, some extra sugar for Rails-developers: The rails-footnotes gem! It adds useful information about the current Rails request to the bottom of each rendered browser page. It also provides helpful links to associated files – which open in gedit!

But that is still not everything… When you get an error page, you can click on the referenced line and gedit will open the accordant document and jump to the line!

Total convenience! I gained much productivity using this tool. Because it’s written with textmate in mind, some tweaking is needed. Let’s start with adding this line to the development section of your Gemfile:

Then run the generator:

The next step is to create a textmate handler that the browser uses to open txmt:// links. Create it somewhere on your disk, for example in ~/.txmt_handler:

#!/bin/bash
# simple txmt: to gedit handler (simple because: needs this order and completeness)
# see https://rbjl.janlelis.com/58
if [[ $1 =~ ^txmt://open\?url=file://(.*?)\&line=([0-9]*)\&column=([0-9]*)$ ]]
then
  exec /usr/bin/gedit ${BASH_REMATCH[1]} +${BASH_REMATCH[2]}:${BASH_REMATCH[3]}
fi

After making this file executable (chmod +x), you need to add the txmt: protocoll handler to your browser. In firefox, just go to about:config and create a boolean key named network.protocol-handler.expose.txmt that you set to false. When you now click on a txmt: link for the first time, firefox will open a popup, in which you can select the script from above.