The Future of Redcar Editor (and You :-))

[Dee]

Hey everyone, its been a while! 

I have been pretty busy of late, but I had a lot of really good discussions at last week's RubyMotion #inspect conference about Redcar and I've been thinking about how to get things moving again for development. I would like to spur some discussion on where Redcar should go from here. Redcar is a very powerful editor, and I think it has a lot of potential to do even more.

Some things still need to be fixed, which can be attested to by viewing the ticket backlog. The vast majority of the 200ish open issues however can be boiled down to a few things:

Outstanding Issues

All Platforms

• Maintain cursor position after pasting multibyte characters

• Add "Save All" (Pull request pending)

• Add option (or convention?) to indent on Tab and unindent on Shift+Tab

• Add in-editor interface for plugin discovery and installation (Start of efforts in redcar/redcar-pluginception)

• Support Ruby 2.0 in syntax highlighting and checking

• Binary package distribution for each platform (mostly complete)

Linux and Windows

• Fix web browser component (XULRunner package on Ubuntu was deprecated some time ago). Migrate to/integrate WebKit and ensure it is installed prior to opening a Web View, or notify the user that it can't be opened.

OS X

• Way to invoke redcar from terminal after installing Redcar.app

• Better default keybindings, avoiding the Option key where possible

I'm going to open up the github issues for the project and add these existing things, in an effort to get focussed. The existing stack is really overwhelming.

Moving into the more distant future, there are a few things that I think would be good maintenance tasks for the project, and I'm sure others could pitch in with more:

Future Maintenance

• Better guides for users, plugin developers, and core developers

• Host website at redcar.github.io, so we can have content collaboration

• Get Redcar running on JRuby 1.7+

• Move to github issues (Update Help menu item to point there)

• Better memory management when opening large files

• Make the test suite more maintainable and be able to run tests on plugins not in "core" for inclusion in a known plugins list

The Even-Further Future!

Ultimately, (and this is purely an idea of mine and certainly up for debate) I would like to put the theory of having the GUI bindings separate from the core functionality to the test. I think we should separate the project intoredcar-core and platform specific bindings projects to better focus on making the editor feel natural on every platform. It would be great to use native components because the editor could be more accessible (There was agreat accessibility talk at #inspect too) and give people the freedom to add functionality specific to their preferred platform, or even open an opportunity for developers on a particular platform to 'own' that project on github and better handle platform-specific bugs.

This would be a big undertaking, but I've tried to start a list of what would need to be done, and would like to lead the effort:

• Separate redcar project into redcar-core and platform-specific projects on github

• Rewrite SWT bindings

  • Tab types
  • Text manipulation
  • Menu generation
  • Keybinding generation
  • Keyboard listeners
  • Undo management
  • Dialogs
  • Tree widget

• Remove dependence on JRuby-specific IO.popen4() in the runnables plugin

• Reimplement textmate bundle (grammar, syntax highlighting) parsing in Ruby (redcar/javamateview)

• Create new app launcher

Your thoughts?

Thanks,

Delisa

[Billy Newman]

Is there debugging support. And specifically attachment to running process in passenger?  

I really wanted a good debugger but never got that far with redcar. Gems problems for 2 hours trying to get it to run on osx made me turn and run. 

Billy
Sent from my iPhone

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[Dee]

Is there debugging support. And specifically attachment to running process in passenger?  

There is a nice plugin for attaching various types of debuggers, which I also used as the basis for the RubyMotion plugin debugger. I don't know much about passenger specifically though.

 

I really wanted a good debugger but never got that far with redcar. Gems problems for 2 hours trying to get it to run on osx made me turn and run.

I think the focus going forward will be on platform-specific installers. As soon as the current stack of 6 or 7 issues for the next version are complete, I'll generate some new ones. Otherwise, installers can be built by running rake installers:[platform], e.g. for OS X rake installers:osx.

Delisa 

[Eric West]

Wow, this made me really happy to see. I thought the project was stone-cold dead. Really hoping to see this move forward again.

[D. Birch]

Is this project still alive somewhere?

[Kurt]

Didn't know I was still on this list!  I've switched to Atom years ago and haven't looked back.

[Aaron McLeod]

Yeah I would recommend to look elsewhere. Redcar was a fun project to work on and learn, but with sublime & atom having so much more momentum and more features, i think they're a much better bet.

On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 1:38 PM Kurt <kurt....@gmail.com> wrote:

Didn't know I was still on this list!  I've switched to Atom years ago and haven't looked back.

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[rogerdpack]

On Sunday, April 7, 2013 at 5:37:50 PM UTC-6, Dee wrote:

Hey everyone, its been a while! 

I have been pretty busy of late, but I had a lot of really good discussions at last week's RubyMotion #inspect conference about Redcar and I've been thinking about how to get things moving again for development. I would like to spur some discussion on where Redcar should go from here. Redcar is a very powerful editor, and I think it has a lot of potential to do even more.

Too bad RubyMotion doesn't support windows as well, or we could port it to that :)

-roger- 

[Delisa]

I definitely tried at one point, losing Windows support was a bummer though. 

Delisa

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[tonypm]

This is excellent news, I am truly hooked on Redcar.  Clean, intuitive, no fuss editor.  I am developing Ruby code for much of the week, and my first action when I start is to load up Redcar.  Thank you so much for present and past effort to all involved.

Tony

[rogerdpack]

Hey thanks everybody for Redcar "back in the day" it was super nice editor and fun to work on, thanks for the good times! :)

On Sunday, April 7, 2013 at 5:37:50 PM UTC-6, Dee wrote:

[Mat Schaffer]

++ hope we cross paths again some time

Maybe it’s time for a rust editor 😆

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-Mat

matschaffer.com

[Delisa]

Hey Roger! 👋 

Those were really good times. Cheers!

Delisa

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[Alex Lourie]

Lordy, Google groups still work ?!

Wow, that's a call from the past ;-)

Cheers everyone.

Alex.

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