TODO

Here’s a list of all I have planned to do in the future for Ruber. They’re grouped according to whether they’re changes to the core of Ruber, to one of the existing plugins or new plugins to be added. Entries inside each group don’t follow a specific order.

If an entry begins with a quotation mark, I’m not convinced it’s a good idea. Entries beginning with an exclamation mark are ideas which I deem difficult to carry out

Ruber Core

? Blocking signals. For example, if the user chooses to close a project, then chooses not to save one of the file, maybe the project shouldn’t be closed at all. It can be implemented having slots connecting to the signal raising an ad-hoc exception. The emitting code rescues that exception and proceeds accordingly
Add mimetype rules to the ProjectFiles extension
Find out whether it’s possible to remove the mnemonics from the main tab widget, as they overlap with other accelerators (menu and, most annoying for me, kate replace bar). If possible, maybe leave them as an option. [UPDATE] It seems that the responsible is KDE::TabWidget. While Qt::TabWidget adds the mnemonics only if the tab text explicitly contains and &, apparently KDE::TabWidget inserts it automatically if it doesn’t exist. However, looking at the corresponding documentation, I don’t understand where the change comes from
? Make the initialize methods of all the widgets meant to be subclassed take a block and handle it as Qt::Widget does (relying on the underlying implementation doesn’t work because the block is called by the parent widget’s initialize method, before much of the initialization has happened). Maybe, this could be considered a bug in qtruby (ask on the list). In that case, they could fix it by making the block call from new, rather than from initialize.
Automatically generate project/config widgets from the file generated by rbuic, so that there’s no more need to create a widget class whose only scope is to load the ui file
Use icons of different sizes for different tasks
Add a public ExternalProgramRunner#options_for method. It is used by other plugins which need to run the program to obtain the options
!Do something so that saving a YamlOptionBackend is an atomic action (this means creating a temp file, writing to it then copying on the actual file. There might be permission problems)
Add API to change the rules for the ProjectFiles extension
!Find some way to allow the user to write to standard input when running programs (both for programs being developed and external programs)
Put all classes created by rbuic under the Ruber::Ui namespace
!See whether it’s possible to break a long line of ruby output into several shorter lines in OutputWidget
add toolbars
!add a system to override actions, so that a plugin can replace the functionality provided by an action of another plugin with its own. This is quite complex, as it would require keeping trace of the slots connected to the actions.
!When running and external program using the RunnerPlugin class, if the program sends output continuosly (as in loop do;puts "hello";end), Ruber freezes. Do something about it (it can be done either in the RunnerPlugin or in the OutputWidget class)
find out a better way to display relative path options in configuration dialog. Currently, the full path is displayed, but this isn’t optimal.
Rewrite the multi-html rspec formatter (used to run Ruber’s own specs)
Add a template system for projects
Recognize ansi escape sequences in OutputWidget
Add a caching mechanism for the plugins to load at startup. It should work this way: when the plugins are changed (that is, from the MainWindow#choose_plugins) method, a plugins_changed is emitted. The application connects to this signal and creates/updates a file containing the names of the plugins to load. This file should be located (I think) in $KDEHOME/share/config/apps/ruber. At startup, see whether this file is newer than both the ruberrc file and of the PDF of all plugins mentioned in it. If so, dont re-compute the dependencies, but use those in the cache. Otherwise, re-compute them. For this to work, when the config file is written, the date of the cache file should be changed (using touch)
Add a way for plugins to add actions to the RMB menu of the editor
Add support from non editor widgets in the main tab bar
!Find a way to have OutputWidget give focus to the editor whenever a key it doesn’t recognize is pressed and have that KeyEvent passed to the editor
!When the bottom tool widget becomes visible, have the editor scroll so that the line which was at the bottom remains visible. Currently, instead, the editor view is resized and the bottom lines are hidden. I don’t know whether this is possible. Neither Kate nor KDevelop do it. KDevelop 3 did it instead.
Add an entry displaying the number of rows in the current file to the statusbar
In the ProjectFilesList extension, make #scan_project use #file_in_project?, if possible
Add a way to specify the order in which pages should be displayed in the configuration dialogs (maybe adding a priority attribute somewhere in the PSF)
Allow sorting tabs by drag and drop
?Per-project recent file list. The behaviour should be very well thought, to avoid the mistakes done by kate.

Plugins

Put all classes created by rbuic under the Ruber::Ui namespace
add toolbars

Ruber Development

!Add a way to specify commands to be run before running the current project, so that, for example, the user can run rake to make sure that files which are automatically generated (for example, ruby files from .ui files) are up-to-date

Find in Files

Split the ReplaceWidget class that the actual replacement is carried on by another class (either the plugin class or a new one). The tool widget should only concern itself with displaying the results. Also, replace many block connections with true slots
If in regexp mode, and the find line edit contains an invalid regexp, detect it, disable the Find and Replace buttons and display a warning

Syntax Checker

See whether it’s possible to have syntax checking for unsaved files (of course, if the user sets the mode or the highlighting properties for the document)

Command

!Replace the tool widget with an irb-based tool widget, if possible

New plugins

Quick Open File

move the Quick Open File action and dialog to a separate plugin
Add completion to the Quick open file dialog

Quick open method/class plugin

Konsole plugin

File system browser plugin

Ruby parser plugin

Class browser plugin

Autocompletion plugin

This should be based on the ruby parser plugin and provide intelligent autocompletion

VCS plugins

There should be plugins for various version control system – at least subversion and git, and maybe a generic VCS plugin