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by Jan Lelis.
Original Post: RubyBuntu -4- Make gedit better than any IDE ;)
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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!
So, as an ubuntu developer, you have the following options:
Even so, get an IDE and be happy with it. I am not saying that all IDEs are bad, for example, Netbeans is quite cool.
Become a vim or emacs freak. Start being productive in thousand years.
Use gedit, because it is a slim, powerful, flexible, fast, pretty and stable editor ;)
Getting the plugins
gedit is the gnome standard editor so it is already installed on a fresh ubuntu. But the fun begins with the plugins, so you should get more of them. There are two ubuntu packages with lots of popular plugins: gedit-plugins and gedit-gmate. The latter is found in the ubuntu on rails ppa. Add/Install:
There are many other plugins available and installing them is quite easy. Just place the downloaded files of the plugin at: ~/.gnome2/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.
Basic settings
At first you should configure some basic settings common for Ruby programming at Edit/Preferences:
View
Display line numbers
on
View
Highlight current line
on
View
Highlight matching bracket
on
Editor
Tab width
2
Editor
Insert spaces instead of tabs
on
Editor
Enable automatic indentation
on
At the Font & Colors tab you can choose some colors that suit you. I use the great “Railscasts Improved”.
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 do not know how to use?
ubuntu 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 with the gconf-editor by activating the option /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels:
Plugin list
You can activate each of the plugins at Edit/Preferences/Plugins. Every plugin in the list without a download link is in one of the above packages. For some plugins I added a shortcut suggestion.
Essential Plugins
You should use these ;)
Code comment
Comment out whole blocks of code with one keystroke.
Edit/Comment Code
Strg+#
Edit/Uncomment Code
Strg+Alt+#
Find In Files
This does a full text search in the specified directory. Especially needed, when working with code you do not know.
Search/Find in files
Strg+Shift+F
Indent Lines
This lets you indent the current line(s). Very useful. Unfortunately, it has been removed in ubuntu 10.4, because it is now possible to indent marked text with the Tab key. However, I prefer the old plugin (download), because you can change the shortcut and you are also able to indent single lines. It really is fun to move around text with Alt+ArrowKeys :)
Edit/Indent
Alt+Right
Edit/Unindent
Alt+Left
Rails Extract Partial
Mark some text, press the shortcut, enter a partial name – a must have for Rails developers.
Edit/Extract Partial
Alt+P
Smart Indent
Auto indentation, customizable via regex. Familiar comfort.
Snap open
I think, this is the most important plugin. Press the shortcut and type the filename you want to open – it integrates with the file browser pane and searches through all files in the selected root directory. In about 9 of 10 file switchings, I use this plugin.
Search/Go to File or Snap/Open
Strg+O
Snippets
Another wonderful helper. It lets you easily include templates by typing an alias and pressing Tab. Furthermore, it puts the cursor to the right spot (e.g. between the html tags). Some templates even have more cursor spots (hit tab again). Alternatively, you can press Strg+Space to get a list of available aliases (also nice for learning them). You can easily customize the snippets at Tools/Manage Snippets…
Word completion
This plugin searches trough all open documents (which are quite a lot when using Snap open) and offers known words for completion. Press Return to choose one.
Maybe you like it?
These plugins might be perfect for you – or annoying. I use some of them.
Embedded Terminal
This adds the gnome-terminal in the bottom pane (Strg+F9). I rather have my terminals in extra windows, but it is ok for a little irb.
External Tools
Lets you execute any commands! The definite toy for power users :). For example, you can easily execute your Ruby code with this snippet:
#!/bin/sh
ruby
Input: Current Document
Output: Display in bottom pane
Change ruby to ruby -c to only check the syntax. You can find lots of more External Tools snippets at the gnome wiki. Again, I prefer using an external terminal in most cases.
Gemini
Automatically adds common characters like closing brackets – but there are occasions, where it does the wrong thing. Nevertheless, I like it.
Rails Hotkeys
Offers Rails-specific shortcuts. Hit Strg+Shift+R and then F1 to see a list of available ones. It is a good idea, but in most cases, Snap open just does the job more intuitive.
Reopen Tabs
Download. Opens all the tabs from last time, when gedit starts. Nice, to quickly get back into work, but pretty slow, when there are lots of open tabs…
The icing on the cake!
Plugins in this category are nice to have, but probably not that important
Color Picker
Press shortcut when cursor is on a color to get a nice color picker. Useful for web/css development.
Code Formatter
Download. Reindent spaghetti Ruby code with on keystroke.
Open Folder
Download. Opens the folder of the current active document.
Hit the shortcut and it displays a list if your TODO/FIXME annotations (like Snap open, it integrates with the file browser). Do it from time to time ;)
There are a lot of more plugins and resources available. Some links you could check out, if you want more:
In the end, there is some nice extra sugar for Rails-developer: The rails-footnotes gem! It adds interesting informations 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 each referenced line and gedit will open the accordant document and jump to the line!
Total convenience! I gained much productivity using this tool.
Install:
sudo gem install rails-footnotes-linux
Add this line to the Rails project’s config/environments/development.rb:
At this spot, a big thank you to all people who developed gedit, translated it, wrote plugins or otherwise contributed. Without you guys, gedit would not be such a great editor!
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