Long time readers of this blog will remember that I used to tweak GNOME’s gedit editor a lot. However, I ditched it for Sublime Text and I am not looking back. Here are some of the things I like about Sublime:

• Offers a good out-of-the-box experience, including an amazing “fuzzy search” tool (ctrl+p)
• It works on ubuntu without any problems
• Fast (enough)
• Multiple cursors!
• Once you have installed Package Control: An integrated extension repository
• Encourages you to write your own extensions
• Looks good
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AngularJS is a great way to build modern web apps and this affects Rails programmers. The combination of both is an excellent choice: Build your single-page app in Angular and let it communicate via JSON with your Rails-API backend (btw, this is exactly what we did for palava). However, you might ask yourself, what the best way to combine Angular and Rails is. Should you use the JavaScript tools world (grunt, yoeman, etc.) or should you prefer the Ruby tools (thor, sprockets)?

And you’ll never want to miss them again!

A little #whyday project, finished at eurucamp 2012, that displays the urls and summaries of all the gems of a Gemfile. Put the code somewhere in your $PATH (I keep little helper scripts like this one in ~/r) and run gemfile from within a the project.

After releasing version 0.9 of my cli password manager, I received friendly feedback and suggestions, which encouraged me to further improve it. Here are some of my experiences implementing pws 1.0:

• stores your passwords in a file on your disk
• encrypts the file with a master password
• is designed for every-day-use
• is written in 234 lines of understandable Ruby code… Read it!
• is tested with 222 Cucumber steps
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This is my first jruby code (written for the clipboard gem) and I was quite surprised that you only need one-liners ;)

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!

How to get the following for your gedit:

• Up-to-date Ruby syntax highlighting
• Proper highlighting for .js.erb or .yml.erb files
• Gemfile.lock highlighting
  
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My eurucamp talk: pdf / odp / speakerrate

puts is great for a quick output, but when a script gets more complex or you want to offer a flexible executable, consider using the logger ;). Since the logger class is part of the Ruby standard library, it can be used everywhere, without installing any gems. And it’s very easy to use :D

13 Rails-specific hints for your rails 3 console.

Hirb: “A mini view framework for console/irb that’s easy to use, even while under its influence. Console goodies include a no-wrap table, auto-pager, tree and menu.” now supports unicode in two ways:

┌───────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Support for unicode full-width characters │ Unicode table characters instead of +/- chars │ └───────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Many people use irb with wirble. I also did.

I’ve been quite happy with it, but sometimes I noted that some symbols were displayed as : without the symbol name (e.g. in method name arrays) and that the representation of regexes looked quite strange.

This is why I’ve looked at the wirble tokenizer, fixed some bugs, liked it, extended it and created Wirb. These are the improvements:

What does it mean when the guy who blogged about irb’s details and wrote most of the successful irb gems (hirb, bond, boson) decides to implement his own irb alternative? There must be something wrong with irb!

We love Ruby. And we love the command line. So… the shell needs to be rubyfied ;).

Fresh is a new gem, trying to achieve this.

Updated for fresh version 0.2.0.

Introducing the fancy_irb gem:

• Use fancy colors! You can colorize the prompts, irb errors, stderr and stdout
• Output results as Ruby comments
• Enhance your output value using procs
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There are many implementations of password managers/safes out there. But lots of them are black boxes, either because they are not open source, or because they have to much features and it gets complicated to understand the source (which is most likely not written in a happy programming language). You don’t know, what really happens with your passwords. So…

Do it yourself!
Do it with Ruby!
Do it in less than 250 lines ;)

Equipped with some tools discussed at the germany.rb 2010 user group meetup, I’ve played around with my ~/.irbrc and put together a little meta gem for some useful irb tools (github)

Not everyone likes debuggers. I rather print the debug values myself – it works and I do not need to learn a debugger :P

With the easy-to-use (and pre-installed) command line utility zenity, it is pretty simple to create useful external tools for gedit!

You can, of course, use an IDE for coding – but reconsider it: After hours of initialization, it tries to do everything for you… Somewhere in the never ending menu jungle… And you need to click all the time… Stop! Focus on the gist! You want to write code!

Most Ruby programmers know: Many things can be done in much less time on the command line. To become more productive, you should take the 10 minutes to configure some basic settings.

Lots of IDEs (e.g. Netbeans) and some editors (e.g. gedit with plugins) have a nice feature: They show comments, which start with something like TODO or FIXME. Those annotations are quickly written and they make it harder to forget some things you wanted to (or have to) do.

I have just discovered that Rails has this feature already built-in!

When I began programming Ruby/Rails, I quickly found the online Ruby documentation at ruby-doc.org and the Rails API, which are both very useful. But unfortunately, one cannot be always online. In this blog post, I’ll demonstrate some ways to generate or get the docs offline and some hints on using them.