Ruby Screenshot of the Week #8: Live Code Templates and TextMate Snippets

I've received several requests for support for TextMate-style snippets. TextMate is a very popular editor among Ruby developers, and a lot of its power comes from its code snippet functionality. Snippets are basically identical to what NetBeans calls "Live Code Templates". The code templates are live in the sense that when you insert the template, you're in a mode where you can jump from one logical section of the template to another, and edits in one section can automatically be updated in other sections. I've just implemented an import mechanism for TextMate bundles. Point at your own bundles (or even the ones distributed with TextMate, although I don't know what the legal issues are with that), and choose import. This will convert all* the snippets into NetBeans Live Code Templates (*=for some values of all). There are two features in TextMate snippets that are not supported: Command execution. A snippet can contain a `shell command` (in backquotes), and at template evaluation time, the command will be executed and the result inserted. In the snippet bundles I looked at, this was used only for a single thing: inserting parentheses on a conditional basis. So I just made the import handle parentheses directly instead. Regular expression replacement. A template can perform regular expression replacement on different instances of the parameters. I can't even tell exactly how this is supposed to work, but for no...

Date: April, 05 2007
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/ruby_screenshot_of_the_week7

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