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The goal of FreeRIDE is simple, yet ambitious: to become THE cross-platform IDE of choice for the Ruby community. We want FreeRIDE to be a first-class IDE on par with those available for other languages. These goals include:
Please realize that this is an early release of FreeRIDE and we still have some work to do before we realize all of these goals. However FreeRIDE is already used by many users on a daily basis and the FreeRIDE uses it to develop FreeRIDE of course. This release already includes some interesting functionalities (see details below) and an extremely flexible plugin architecture that makes it easy to add new extensions.
This user documentation is fairly minimal. But it doesn't need to be extensive (at least not yet), because what has been implemented so far is very straightforward and operates pretty much like any other GUI-based IDE or code editor. You should find its use to be familiar and comfortable (if not, then please let us know).
FreeRIDE is built on a very flexible plugin architecture called FreeBASE that allows it to be easily extended. In fact, except for the code that implements the plugin system, the entire FreeRIDE IDE is implemented as a set of plugins. If you are interested in creating your own plugins to add new capabilities to FreeRIDE, or if you want to join the FreeRIDE project, please read the DeveloperDocumentation.
The following features have been implemented in this release of FreeRIDE (0.9.5):
The code editing panel is implemented using [Scintilla] and should be familiar to anyone who has used Scite or any other Scintilla-based code editor. It includes basic code-editing features like syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, code(un)folding and the expected basic navigation (Ctrl-tab to move by word, shift-key to extend selections, tab-key to indent selections, etc.).
The prefered way for installing FreeRIDE is to use the FreeRIDE installers that we built for you. FreeRIDE installers are currently available for Windows and Linux. A MacOS X installer is in preparation. There are many advantages to using the FreeRIDE installers:
The FreeRIDE installers are available in the [Download] section of RubyForge. Please note if you are a Windows users new to Ruby and don't have Ruby installed on your machine you may want to want to install [one-click Ruby installer for Windows] which a comes with Ruby and many additional packages including FreeRIDE.
For Windows users, the easiest way is to install the Ruby one-click installer for Windows (see in the previous section). It includes FreeRIDE and it is quite easy to update only the Ruby source code without changing your Ruby installer.
For Linux users it is very likely that your favorite distro comes with the FOX toolkit either already installed or available as a contributed package. FXRuby and FXscintilla are available on their respective projects web site (see hyperlinks above).
If [Fox], [fxscintilla] or [FXRuby] rpms are not available for your distribution, you'll need to build them from source. [Fox] is normally installed as would be expected:
tar xzf fox-1.2.x.tar.gz cd fox-1.2.x ./configure make make install
Gentoo users: You need to emerge fxscintilla before fxruby. Or, if you already have fxruby installed, you have to re-emerge fxruby after emerging fxscintilla. The reason is, the emerge (or the ./configure itself?) autodetects the presence of fxscintilla when doing the fxruby build. If it's not there, your fxruby build won't have fxscintilla "in it", and FreeRIDE will crash when trying to open/edit files.
The rest of the installation is as per a normal linux install, firstly [fxscintilla]:
tar xzf fxscintilla-1.62.tar.gz cd fxscintilla-1.62 ./configure make make install
then [FXRuby]:
tar xzf FXRuby-1.2.4.tar.gz cd FXRuby-1.2.4 ruby install.rb config -- --with-fxscintilla-include=/usr/local/include/fxscintilla --with-fxscintilla-lib=/usr/local/lib ruby install.rb setup ruby install.rb install
FreeRIDE also relies on a number of other Ruby packages but they come with the FreeRIDE software (redist directory). The reason why we did that is:
The directory in which you installed FreeRIDE contains a system script named "run.bat" that will start FreeRIDE. In Linux you would use 'sh run.bat' and in Windows you can simply execute this script directly. If you used the Windows installer click on the bulleye icon to start FreeRIDE. If you used the Linux installer the command to run is given at the end of the installation script. If you use a KDE or Gnome compliant window manager the bulleye icon will also appear on your desktop.
FreeRIDE is entirely written in Ruby so, depending on the speed of your computer, it may take a while for FreeRIDE to start up. Once FreeRIDE has started, however, performance should be good.
The first time FreeRIDE is launched, a window will pop up with a menu bar at the top and the tool ber right below. At the bottom of the screen is a status where you will see status messages displayed in the course of your work session. These can be information, warning or error messages. So keep an eye on it!
At the center of the page is an empty grey zone where editor windows will appear when you create or open ruby files. On the borders of the editor zones are three areas called 'dockpanes'. They are initially invisible but they will show up as soon as you launch new services. There are 3 dockbars: one on the left called the West dockbar, one on the right called the East dockbar and one at the botton called the South dockbar. (see illustration below)
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Menu Bar (menu entries and commands) | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Tool bar (icons shortcut to commands) | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | West | | East | | | Editor pane | | | Dockbar | | Dockbar | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | South Dockbar | | | | | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Status bar (messages) | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
As you run new services (file browser, source browser, IRB...) they will show up in the form of 'dockpanes' that docks into one of the 3 dockbars. As an example you may click on View -> File List or type the Ctrl-L shortcut. The File browser will pop up and immediatyely dock into the West dockbar. A dockpane can be undocked and redocked at any time. To play with this feature you can click on the leftmost icon in the title bar of the file browser. The File browser will become an independent window that you can move and resize at will. Similarly you can redock it by clicking again on the same icon.
FreeRIDE remembers the position and size of all the undocked dockpanes. So the next time you undock the same service it will take the excat same geometry as before. Similarly when restarting FreeRIDE all undocked services will automatically place themselves where they where when you stopped FreeRIDE.
Before we go into more details about the FreeRIDE features, let's go through a sample coding session to give you a flavor a what FreeRIDE can do for you:
The first thing you'll want to do is to create a new file. Click on File -> New: a new empty editor window named 'Untitled 1' is created. Type the following code in the empty editor window:
Click on File -> Save and navigate in a working directory of your choice where you'll save the file with the name 'buffer.rb'.
For the most part, the menu commands should be familiar and obvious.
SOme items of the View menu may be greyed meaning that the corresponding service can not be viewed. In most cases this is because the service has not been yet started. To start it you must use the appropriate menu entry in the Tool menu or in the Tool bar.
Ctrl+C Copy Ctrl+D Debug Ctrl+F Find Ctrl+G Goto line Ctrl+J Code Templates... Ctrl+L File Browser Ctrl+N New File Ctrl+O Open File Ctrl+Q Quit Ctrl+R Replace Ctrl+S Save Ctrl+Shift+S Save As Ctrl+V Paste Ctrl+W Close File Ctrl+X Cut Ctrl+Y Redo Ctrl+Z Undo F1 Ruby Documentation Ctrl+F2 F3 Find Next Shift+F3 Find Previous F5 Run Ctrl+F5 Clear Output Window F6 IRB F7 Source Navigator F8 Debug
The Source Browser helps shows you the structure of your source code and lets you jump directly to differently parts of your source code. It does this by parsing your source code and displaying an outline of the contents of your source code as hierarchical tree. Clicking on an item in the tree (like a method name or a class name) will cause the editing pane to jump directly to that item in your source code.
The Source Browser occupies a docked window pane the runs down the left side of the FreeRIDE window (if the Source Browser is not visible, you may need to use you mouse to grab the splitter bar at the left of the editing pane and drag it to the right).
Currently, you must manually force the Source Browser to refresh (reparse the source code) after you have made changes to your source code. This is a temporary measure that was needed to maintain adequate performance. The long term goal is to make this completely automatic.
(to be written) ? Note: shift-click left button mouse in the margin of the editor to set or clear a breakpoint.
The Databus Inspector is a GUI tool for interactively exploring the current state of the internal Databus that is the central communications hub for all FreeRIDE plugins. This will only be of interest to developers who are creating and debugging FreeRIDE plugins.
Please see the developer documentation (DevDoc) for more details about the Databus.
New in version 0.95 is basic support for projects. To create a project select Project -> New project. Every project requires a base-directory. This directory is the default working directory for the project. Each project has two types of directories the user can specify: source and required directories. Adding a directory to either list will cause FreeRIDE to search the directory (and subdirectories) for existing Ruby-files and parses them.
Note: Due to a bug in Ripper it is currently NOT possible to use the Ruby-distribution directory as either source- or required-directory. FreeRIDE will segfault with the message: [BUG] cannot convert system ID to string: 337 Hopefully this bug will be fixed for the next release.
After succesfully creating a project the ProjectExplorer? will be openened in the left dockpane (press F8 to toggle the ProjectExplorer?) and it will show all opened projects in the tree. All Ruby-files that have been successfully parsed will also show their internal structure just like the SourceBrowser? would do. The Explorer has a right-click-menu with the following options:
Version: $Id: userhelp.html,v 1.6 2006/01/16 03:04:17 curthibbs Exp $