I know a lot of people were excited when they saw the RubyOnRails screencast featuring TextMate. I know I was…!
Well I had the chance to try out TextMate and I can see why everyone is talking about it, it’s a great editor for web development and it’s a pleasure to work with!
Unfortunatly being stuck on a Windows platform (for now at least) TextMate is not an option. Like everyone else in the same situation I searched for an alternative..in vain…that is, untill now. Don’t get too excited, I’m not saying I found textmate on windows, but I did find a nice way to emulate some of it’s features with jEdit…
I’ll make a serie of posts on it, talking about which features I like about it, and how to set them up. The topic of this first post is the snippets. One of TextMate’s great feature is it’s snippet system, where you can set several variables and navigate among those variables with the Tab key. The way to do practically the same thing with jEdit is to install the SuperAbbrevs plugin. Installing plugins in jEdit is as easy as making 3-4 clicks with your mouse…first go to the Plugin menu and open the plugin manager, from there look at the install tab, select the plugins you want and install them with a click of the mouse.
Once you installed the SuperAbbrevs plugin, it’s pretty easy to figure out how to make it works, just open the plugin options, in the plugin menu again, and add your snippets. It uses pretty much the same syntax as TextMate (but there is no \ to escape characters, so if you need to use the $…just type it in…)
Here is a screencast of the plugin in action
More to come…
UPDATE: If you want to use jEdit for rails development you might want to check out jEdit Ruby it features ruby/rails syntax highlighting, method/class completion, error highlighting etc…