In one of my first postings I’d like to mention, what I think, Ruby lacks today.

A good editor

I use vim, some use emacs, others like textmate. RadRails and/or RDT for Eclipse have a good feature set. Komodo Edit looks great. But they all have one great disadvantage. None of them is written in Ruby.

I think, the community needs a cross-plattform editor, written in Ruby and some cross-plattform gui toolkit, that renders nicely on the main ruby development systems - linux and mac os. It should be more than simple macros and text replacement (I’m refering to TextMate here).

I’d like to have autocompletion both context aware and on a pattern matching file based style (everything, that vi is able to do in version 6), a class browser for all classes and not just the current file, a refactoring wizard or helper or tool or view. To cut it short, I’d like to have the Smalltalk development tools for Ruby - with one exception: the base editor. The thing with that you edit texts in Squeak is really hard to love - perhaps you can get used to it after half a year. But one could do this better. I think the Smalltalk guys started with all the interesting stuff, as I would do, and forgot about the editor itself.

Why should it be written in Ruby? Because then it may be edited and extended by the ones who use it. That is the only way to ensure constant development.

I don’t know who should build this editor, but I would spent money for that.