Redcar

July 20, 2010

redcar jruby rvm

I have been using Redcar this morning after hearing about it on the Ruby5 podcast.

I am pretty impressed so far. It has good support for Textmate bundles and works cross-platform. This was an important detail for me since I use OSX at home and Linux at work and it would be nice to use the same editor everywhere. I also like the fact that my editor is written in Ruby and is open source.

Using rvm, I was able to set it up pretty easily:

rvm install jruby
rvm use jruby
gem install redcar

And then since I don't usually use jruby, I set up a quick bash function to call it:

function rc() {
  rvm jruby -S ~/.rvm/gems/jruby-1.5.1/bin/redcar $@ 1> /dev/null 2>&1 &
}

From there I can just call rc [dir] from the command line and it opens the project.

I did have one small issue with installing the ruby-shoulda bundle. The wiki says that if you put bundles in ~/.redcar/textmate/Bundles and delete the cache, then they should show up. However, I wasn't able to get it to work unless I put in in the system bundle directory at: ~/.rvm/gems/jruby-1.5.1/gems/redcar-0.3.8.1/textmate/Bundles

I am pretty excited where they can take this project, and possibly even contribute to it in the future.