FreeRIDE User Documentation

Introduction

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 a very early release of FreeRIDE and we have a long way to go before we realize these goals. This release includes basic functionality and an extremely flexible plugin architecture that makes it easy to add extensions.

Overview

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 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:

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, and the expected basic navigation (Ctrl-tab to move by word, shift-key to extend selections, tab-key to indent selections, etc.).

Installing FreeRIDE

To run properly FreeRIDE requires 3 external software components:

For Windows users a FreeRIDE specific Ruby distribution is made available by Andy Hunt and includes FOX, FXRuby and FXScintilla. You can get it [here].

For Linux users it is very likely that your favorite distro comes with the FOX toolkit either already installed or available as a contrib. FXRuby and FXscintilla are available on the projects web site (see hyperlinks above). Worst case you can get the 3 of them from the [FreeRIDE file repository].

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:

Running FreeRIDE

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.

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.

Menu Commands

For the most part, the menu commands should be familiar and obvious.

The File Menu

The Edit Menu

The View Menu

The Run Menu

The Tools Menu

The Help Menu

The Default Keyboard Shortcuts

 Ctrl+C        Copy  
 Ctrl+D        Debug  
 Ctrl+L        File Browser  
 Ctrl+N        New File  
 Ctrl+O        Open File  
 Ctrl+S        Save  
 Ctrl+Shift+S  Save As  
 Ctrl+V        Paste  
 Ctrl+W        Close File  
 Ctrl+X        Cut
 Ctrl+Y        Redo
 Ctrl+Z        Undo
 F5            Run
 Ctrl+F5       Clear Output Window
 F7            Source Navigator
 F8            Output Window

The Source Browser

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 is 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.

Debugging

(to be written) – Note: shift-click left in margin of the edit-pane to set or clear a breakpoint.

The Databus Inspector

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 for more details about the Databus.

Version: $Id: userhelp.html,v 1.4 2003/01/13 09:57:17 curthibbs Exp $


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