development

Snippets!

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Awesome:

The basics are not too complicated. Slap a couple of Gtk::TextMarks around each tab stop to keep track of where they are, and monitor keystrokes to update mirrors and transformations.
The part that really flummoxed me was what to do when tab stops are right next to each other. Because they go to zero width all [...]

Nice new editing features

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Smart indenting.
Automatic indenting of pasted text.
Smart paired characters like brackets.

The first and the last are demonstrated here:

I’m very happy at the speed I was able to develop these features. Automatic indenting of pasted text took 20 minutes to write (once the smart indenter had been written), and smart paired characters I implemented between 6am and [...]

Syntax Highlighting With Extra Awesome

Friday, January 11th, 2008

Since Christmas I have been rewriting the core of the syntax highlighting engine in C as Ruby just wasn’t fast enough. I was a bit apprehensive about this, but the Ruby-C interface is very nice to work with, and toss in Glib and it’s really not that painful. There’s something deeply satisfying about profiling, re-implementing [...]

Freebase

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

FreeBASE is a Ruby library that deserves to be better known.
FreeBASE is a plugin management system that automatically handles dependencies and plugin loading and starting. It has an internal databus that it uses, and that your application can use to store data and services. FreeBASE is part of the FreeRIDE project, but can be used [...]