Re: Small improvements to ruby-mode

[Bozhidar Batsov]

On Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 2:31 AM, Dmitry Gutov wrote:

* Font-lock changes

Some of the Ruby "keywords" that are currently highlighted as keywords are

not actually Ruby keywords, but plain methods - alias_method,

module_function, throw, raise, private, protected, public. I feel that they

should not be highlighted like this to keep the highlighting syntactically

correct. Technically speaking true, false and self are also keywords, but

given their semantics I guess the current highlighting is ok.

On a related note I think that it would make sense to use

font-lock-builtin-face for methods like alias_method, module_function,

throw, raise, private, protected, public and other keyword like methods for

Kernel and Module. I feel that such a move would increase the readability of

the Ruby source code.

Good idea, done in revno 113128. I also added require, require_relative

and autoload to the second list.

Great! Thanks a lot of the quick response!

 

Should we add more, e.g. include,

attr_accessor, using, refine?

Yes, I think we should definitely add more. The ones you listed - for sure. We should also add fail (it's a synonym for raise), extend, etc. Btw catch is also a method, not a keyword. loop should also be on the second list, as should be proc and lambda IMO.

I'd also suggest adding the "command-like" methods for Kernel that are usually used without an explicit receiver everywhere. There's not that many such commands:

abort

at_exit

catch

eval

exec

exit

exit!

fail

fork

format

p

print

printf

putc

puts

rand

sleep

spawn

sprintf

srand

syscall

system

trap

warn 

* Treat more filenames/file extensions as Ruby code

Most Rubyists these days have to add the following in their Emacs config:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.rake\\'" . ruby-mode))

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.ru\\'" . ruby-mode))

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("Gemfile\\'" . ruby-mode))

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("Guardfile\\'" . ruby-mode))

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("Capfile\\'" . ruby-mode))

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.thor\\'" . ruby-mode))

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("Thorfile\\'" . ruby-mode))

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("Vagrantfile\\'" . ruby-mode))

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.jbuilder\\'" . ruby-mode))

These should be consolidated into a single regexp and should probably be

made a bit tighter (e.g. don't put BadCapfile in ruby-mode).

Also done, revno 113129 and 113130.

Fantastic! 

I'm not too happy about having so many different patterns, tho (even if

consolidated into a single regexp). Why are so many different namings

used?

These are for different tools, using different DSLs inside. Anyway, I

blame Make, they started it.

It sounds like the Ruby people consider that all the world is

Ruby and other tools just have to deal with it. Would it have been so

hard to add a .rb to all those <Foo>file ?

Most of (?) these work just as well if you add the extension, but nobody

actually does that.

* Implement some ruby-tools like commands in ruby-mode

ruby-tools is a small package, that adds some extra code manipulation

commands https://github.com/rejeep/ruby-tools

We could integrate it into ruby-mode, of course.

I'm not so sure about re-implementing it, though. It's easy enough to

install in its current form, no?

Sure - my point is that not all Emacs users would know about the package. I'd venture a guess saying most of them won't. The functionality in it seems a perfect fit for ruby-mode. Even if it has to be reimplemented - we're talking about a only a handful of not particularly complex commands. 

Patches and suggestions on what polish we could provide exactly are

always welcome.