I might have waited a bit longer before tagging this release, but I’m going to be very busy with work for a few weeks and I wanted to get what fixes there were out there for people to use.

This is still alpha-quality software! Use at your own risk and if there is something missing you need, add it! We will commit patches promptly.

New contributers

• Mark Wilkinson
• Pat Ciambrone
• poweradapter
• Henrik Hodne

New features, enhancements

• Fuzzy file finder notices new files and runs MUCH faster.
• Undo close tab (Ctrl+Shift+T)
• Type ” or ( or [ etc to wrap selection in pair.
• Warm startup 3 times faster.
• Added Incremental Search menu item.
• Now prompts to save if file is modified when closed.
• HtmlTab now uses Webkit instead of Mozilla
• Convert case commands
• Keybindings match up with Gnome better (Ctrl+C/V)
• Added Scala and Haskell bundles to the default bundle set.
• Included Railscasts theme - thanks Ryan Bates!

I am a little disappointed that neither the bundle support nor the performance of the syntax highlighter have significantly improved in this release, and they will be the priorities for 0.3.

Installing

The installation instructions are slightly changed. In particular there are no longer any release tarballs. You have to clone the source from git. Sorry, there are still no Debian packages, but we are working on getting some ready.

Plans for 0.3

Some things 0.3 will have:

• Improved highlighter performance - I am aware of the various issues around this. There is plenty of low-hanging fruit in this area.
• Autocompletion - Silvio Heuberger is working on this.
• A new smart indenter. In particular, it should handle indentation correctly in erb files.
• RSpec, Rails and Cucumber bundles should all work
• An embedded project pane (so the project view will no longer be in a tab).

That Railscasts theme in action:

Best wishes, and thanks to everyone who has expressed support for Redcar!

DBL

Here is a screenshot of the fuzzy file finder:

Progress:

• I really am using Redcar full time, at work and at home now, and Redcar has become much more stable in recent weeks.
• However there remain a number of serious bugs related to the editing component. Users should be careful to save regularly.
• The Text bundle commands are completely supported, and the Source and Ruby bundles are close behind.
• I am aware that installation is beyond difficult. However the nature of Redcar’s dependencies makes packaging a challenge. I am considering a Shoes model for distribution (Shoes has an amazing installation experience), and if anyone has any experience with packaging software for Linux, please get on the mailing list and share.

• I’m giving a talk on Redcar at LRUG on March 9th.
• I’ve been getting up at 5:30AM so I can do an hour of Redcar before work. Things are therefore progressing a bit more rapidly now.
• There is now a new repository of bundles for use with the Redcar project. redcar-bundles. I am working on porting the Textmate bundles over to work with Redcar. This is mainly the Support libraries, I’m trying not to touch the bundles at all so we can maintain cross-compatibility.
• We’re now using Zerenity as a CocoaDialog replacement. Zerenity was written by Farrel Lifson as a Ruby port of Zenity, the Gnome command-line dialog application. Farrel has also been good enough to implement a couple of new features and make it available as a gem for Redcar users.
• The bug tracker is being used consistently now. And I am totally converted to Lighthouse nowadays

Have another screenshot too:

1. There is now a bug tracker online at redcar.lighthouseapp.com. Please send your problems there, and I’ll get on the case.
2. Simple macros (no saving) now work. I was pleased with how easy this was to implement, probably only about 30 lines of code.

I hope you recognize this theme:

1. There is a Redcar twitter feed at http://twitter.com/_redcar. I’ll post short news and updates there, in the same fashion as http://twitter.com/datamapper.
2. People have been asking for a bug tracker for Redcar. I did have a Redmine instance set up for Redcar, and I’ll get it back online again when I can.
3. I’ve been away on holiday for a week or so, which is why I missed the comments in the IRC channel. Back now.
4. Would the commenter ‘R’ from the last post please get in touch, I may be able to help with the problem you’re having. Please email me at dan@fluentradical.com

It’s been a while since I posted a screenshot:

This morning I implemented these six commands on the context menu for the Project Plugin.

I’m also now developing Redcar 100% with Redcar. So you could say that Redcar was now self-hosting.

I’ll be hanging around most days and I live in the GMT timezone. The best timezone.

Work remaining before I can package it up:

Improvements to the speedbar. The speedbar is the function in Redcar that is like the search bar in Firefox that appears at the bottom of tabs. As previously designed there was only one speedbar per Redcar window, but I have decided that it is useful to have one per tab, so that you can have multiple editing contexts. Do you agree with this decision? Please comment.

Snippet compatibility. I’m going to make a survey of the TextMate snippets, and try and ensure that they are as fully compatible as possible. For the Dogfood release TextMate command support is going to be patchy, though I’ll try to get as much done as possible.

Dependency packaging and build scripts. Philip who has a blog called Ivercore has shown infinite patience in working through the dependencies needed to get Redcar installed. He’s done it twice, once before the project moved over to using GtkMateView and once after. Thanks Philip. These dependencies now need to be packaged and a build script/makefile written.

GtkMateView checklist. The buffer reparsing needs to be finished off (at the moment it redoes the entire buffer after every keypress!). I’m thinking that the new scheme will be Emacs like, in that it will reparse your current line after every keypress and will reparse the rest of your screen only once you have rested for half a second. The Dogfood release will not include background threaded parsing, but that is a priority for after.

The Project plugin. This has a few items needed, like a context menu and the ability to open a folder from the command line.

I hope that this release will be out sometime towards the end of November.