Synthesis

So, I don’t have a Mac yet (its on the way), so in the meantime, I use jEdit, the unsung hero of the non-Mac Rails programmer world. It’s a super fast, highly extensible editor. Having now read a few articles and installed some additional plugins, I found I can get most of the whiz-bang Textmate editor features, for free, on all platforms!

I thought I’d “give a little back to the community” and whip up some SuperAbbrev files for ruby and rhtml that mimic all of the Textmate Rails bundle snippets.

Note: This was totally inspired by Textmate and the syncPEOPLE Rails plugin for Textmate. So thanks to you guys for being awesome. I just thought I’d see how close I could get.

And why not, lets take it a little beyond the Textmate rails snippets, and throw in a few more that seem useful and obvious.

Basically, on the RHTML side, there is a TON of additional useful snippets.

Now this doesn’t include the other neat syncPeople commands, but if someone wants to help out with writing some jEdit macros, that would be dope.

So please, try it out, let me know if it works, add more snippets, etc.

Update: Matt Torok alerted me on the Rails mailing list that SuperAbbrevs only works with jEdit versions >=4.2final and <=4.3pre2. If you’re using the latest beta release, 4.3pre3, it’ll go wacky when you try to hit tab to switch between the fields.

What are snippets?

Snippets are small capsules of code that are activated by a key sequence followed by [CTRL-Enter]. For example, mct[CTRL-Enter] will activate the Migration Create Table snippet. The SuperAbbrevs plugin makes this possible.

Download:

• jEdit Snippets for Ruby on Rails – v0.1

Instructions:

1. Install jEdit 4.2 if you haven’t already. (Note: Apparently SuperAbbrevs isn’t currently compatible with 4.3pre3)
2. Install the SuperAbbrevs plugin (use the built in plug in manager to install it).
3. Configure a keyboard shortcut for SuperAbbrevs expansion – mine is set to CTRL-Enter. Learn how to do this here.
4. The files in the archive are SuperAbbrevs setting files. Extract them into {userhome}/.jedit/SuperAbbrevs/

   On windows, that’ll be something like: C:\Documents and Settings\username\.jedit\SuperAbbrevs\

5. Restart jEdit and go to Plugins > Plugin Options > SuperAbbrevs. Under the Abbrev Set dropdown, select either Ruby or Rhtml to get a list of all the shortcuts.
6. The best way to learn these is to go through the reference guide (below) while running jEdit and just try each one out. You’ll catch on quick. The naming scheme is really simple and follows a pattern – first letter of each word. bt becomes belong_to, ho becomes has_one, ist becomes image_submit_tag, etc.

Documentation / Reference Guide

• jEdit Shortcuts for Ruby on Rails Documenation

• Need a solution for RadRails? Voila: TextMate-like Template Syntax for RadRails