Redcar Blog
redcareditor.com · Company blog · on HN since 2009
The Redcar blog covers releases of Redcar, an open source TextMate-style programmer's editor written in Ruby, later JRuby.
What HN saysHN commenters suggest Redcar as a free TextMate alternative that supports TextMate bundles and themes, though one reports it was slow and another calls it dead.
19HN people shared it
15linked it in comments
4stories submitted
82story points
12 years agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Redcar: Textmate-ish programmer’s editor for Gnome with bundles support16 people · 62 points · first shared 2009 · 36 comments on HN
- 2Redcar is moving to JRuby1 people · 18 points · first shared 2009 · 3 comments on HN
- 3Redcar 0.3.5 is out1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 4Redcar 0.8 - Ruby syntax checker, Comment code1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
nuclearsandwich · 2011-07-31
http://redcareditor.com is a free and open source TextMate-like editor and worth checking out. If you really want TextMate specifically I would appeal to the developer themself. Many of us know how rough tight financial situations are but the amount of free (in speech and beer) editors out there makes piracy nothing but crass.
binbasti · 2010-05-29
http://redcareditor.com is an open source, cross platform clone of Textmate currently in development. It supports Textmate themes and bundles, and for the split pane guys in here: yes, it does that too.
Last time I checked (a few months ago) it was pretty slow and unstable, but I guess the project is worth watching if you're not on OS X.
Jarred · 2011-07-30
I completely agree - Sublime Text is awesome.
I originally coded in C# with Visual Studio. The part I had most difficulty with while switching to Ruby wasn't the syntax change (I loved that part), but the editor. Visual Studio really does a lot for you, but you don't even need to do most of that stuff in Ruby.
Just finding a good text editor for Ruby is a challenge. I'm very picky about text editors, and I prefer to code in Windows, just because it's the most comfortable environment (in my opinion). I was coding in Redcar (http://redcareditor.com/) which is a cross-platform Ruby IDE. It was very buggy and felt gross. It wasn't efficient, and it is missing a lot. I tried Notepad++, but after 5 minutes of it, I didn't want to deal with it. It just felt really old. I tried Vim too, and of what little I do know of making it more productive, I thought it was awesome. I don't want to spend that much time learning how to use the utilities for coding though, I want to get started. I use Vim for editing various config files on my server machine, but other than that I rarely use Vim
Then, I tried Sublime Text 2 and I knew that's what I was going to go with. It was much cleaner, stabler, and offered the right kinds of things, things that I didn't get with Redcar, Visual Studio, or (especially) Notepad++.
rurounijones · 2015-02-27
Just in case you don't know about it. If you are looking for an editor written, and extensible, in (j)ruby then there is always http://redcareditor.com/
Project is dead but the program is a pretty fully-fledged text editor from what I have heard.
midas007 · 2014-02-27
Redcar is a TextMate compatible editor in Ruby (JRuby).
http://redcareditor.com/
But like all editors, they have to have some clear advantages and a community, or it's not a viable option.
user2459 · 2012-03-26
gedit: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/mac/gedit/3.2/
text wrangler: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html
redcar: http://redcareditor.com/
but you're really not gonna get any better than textmate or sublime text 2
vinodkd · 2011-04-01
it looks like you could use most any text editor. most os's have a default text editor.
if you want a ruby IDE, try redcar - http://www.redcareditor.com.
yock · 2011-01-27
RadRails and Redmine are going to be the closest to the Netbeans Ruby support, others have mentioned those already. Something closer to the heart of many Ruby developers is Redcar. It's a text editor installed as a Ruby gem generally meant to replicate Textmate functionality.
http://redcareditor.com/
ericb · 2011-01-27
http://redcareditor.com/
A Ruby editor, written in Ruby, that you can extend using Ruby.
auxbuss · 2011-01-04
And for those missing Textmate on Linux there's always redcar http://redcareditor.com/
masterj · 2010-05-30
Some rubyists are trying with red car http://redcareditor.com/ but it's still quite a ways off from being usable.
Sublime Text (www.sublimetext.com) could theoretically be ported over to Linux and Windows as it's GUI is all OpenGL and C interfacing with python. The author's original intent was that it be portable between platforms, but he seems to have pushed that idea to the side. He's no longer working on it full-time either. Which is a shame because it's quite good and comparable to TextMate in many ways.
nailer · 2010-05-25
http://redcareditor.com/ looks as if it will be decent. But yes, I agree.
lucraft · 2010-03-07
Specifically, the ability to run Clojure code. :)
I want to make it possible to write plugins in Clojure for http://redcareditor.com It should be pretty easy to do, this will make it even easier.
demallien · 2009-06-15
It's been (well, is in the process of being) done - http://redcareditor.com/
It's already useable, if you can deal with the pain of the installation process.
amk · 2010-05-27
I didn't use it for a long time. It works, but it still needs cygwin to be install for some snippets.
That's a little ironic. installing cygwin on wine.. but I guess that's the only way to get a text-mate like editor on linux.
Or you could try something called Red Car Editor (http://redcareditor.com) which proclaims to be an editor specially made for ruby/rails programmers. It looks pretty impressive, but again I couldn't get it installed properly. (I think the latest version runs on jRuby platform)
EDIT: I got inspired to try Red Car again after posting this comment. Uninstalled Ruby completely from Windows 7, installed jRUby 1.5. Red car gem installation went perfectly, but the editor is shockingly slow and unresponsive. I don't know if the same applies to linux platform, or if there is something wrong with my system (its a 2 year old laptop, and its been a long while since I have reinstalled the Windows OS)