About the ecb repository, it seems to work just fine for me. Are you behind a proxy that enforces https? May be you want to check the communication using wireshark, tcpdump or something. Or it may have something to do with github servers in your region. github.com for me resolves to 207.97.227.239. Hope this helps.

About refactoring, I was a RubyMine user a while back and have had good and bad experiences with it. Good for simple extract variable stuff, and bad with rename-method kinda refactoring. The problem is with a dynamic language with no type-checking and compilation, its so easy to get stuff wrong. I have stopped trying to do tool-assisted refactoring on Ruby code. I still write a lot of Ruby code but atleast for me there is no value in kind of refactorings the tools can get right and the annoyance of having to check ‘git diff’ everytime I try one is just too much of an overhead.

The kind of refactoring(s) that actually give you value are ‘extract module with common implementations’ etc, but tools do not support that kinda stuff. Besides, even if tools did support, you wouldn’t trust it after it has messed it up a few times.

I still prefer Emacs for everything other than Java(IntelliJ community-edition is my tool of choice for hacking Java).

Given my opinion of tool-assisted refactoring for dynamic languages, i haven’t bothered to dig deep into this, but something called ropemacs exists for python. Rope actually runs within an inferior Python VM, and performs smart auto-suggests and allows accurate refactoring(s). I wonder if there is something similar out there for Ruby. I wanted to write one but never had enough time of my hand.

IntelliJ Idea bundles some seriously kick-ass support for Java refactoring(s) but RubyMine doesn’t inherit it and doesn’t work for me.

git submodule update from .emacs.d fails with the following error …
Cannot get remote repository information
Perhaps git-update-server-info needs to be run there ?
Clone of http://….ecb.git into submodule path ‘vendor/ecb’ failed

Peeking in to .gitmodules, the following defn is pointing to http instead of https
[submodule "vendor/ecb"]
path=vendor/ecb
url=http://github.com/emacsmirror/ecb.git

Interested to know your take on refactoring support on emacs for rails.
I found RubyMine has support for some of the common refactoring like extract method, introduce parameter …

Also, in your setup can you access ruby documentation within emacs?

thanks again for your help.

About sidebar, my suggestion is, don’t dump on ECB just yet, its a pretty powerful and nifty tool. I have been a TextMate user for over an year so have given it a fair shot and didn’t find its sidebar nearly as useful as that of ECB. But like you pointed out, ECB is a keyboard based tool. I understand what you mean when you say it doesn’t work too well with mouse. However, for better navigation between windows, I use something called window-numbering mode, which provides me M- based(where n is window number, starting at top-left corner with 1) navigation between windows. I find it especially useful while in ECB windows. About the multiple splits in sidebar, I think you probably want to switch to a different layout(M-x ecb-change-layout (press TAB on the prompt to see a listing of layouts that come bundled with ECB)). You also may want to checkout this thing called ‘speedbar’ which renders just a navigable tree(like TextMate) unlike many of ECB layouts that render multiple windows, each for a specific purpose. However, having said all that, ECB is indeed a keyboard based tool, so is not the right choice if you want to use the mouse. I am not sure if speedbar is the same too, so you probably want to check it out. But honestly, I never try to reach out to the mouse while im wired to emacs(infact, i’d really hate it if i was forced to) because the keyboard in emacs is just so well done!

There is another interesting extension named textmate-mode, which allows M-t(textmate lookup file) style navigation within repositories(idenfified by .git or .hg etc). I have enhanced it to make it work better with with conflicting file names/conflicting sub-paths and all of those enhancements are available in the repo. Once you start using this extension for navigating the repo and get comfortable with rinari jumps, you’ll not need the vanilla sidebar anymore. However ECB sidebar still comes in handy because it shows you other interesthing things like methods in a class, history of files you opened(with parent paths) etc.

Probably the best way to add these resources is to do it one at a time. Then you get to test each one and it’s easier to troubleshoot if something doesn’t work right. Plus you get a little start on learning what each extension is supposed to do.

I started out doing this the other day and ran into a problem with some module, and thought I’d take a short cut by just installing your repo. Turned out to be a long cut. Spent most of the day yesterday trying to get it to work and ended up scrapping the whole thing and going back to the one-at-a-time route, which mostly worked, and it was handy to have your repo to drag things from.

First thing that happened when I tried just loading your repo was that Aquamacs (2.2) loaded a bunch of files and suddenly shrunk to postage-stamp size in the corner of the window. Turns out that there are 4 or 5 files in your repo that have comments like the following:

;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom.
;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
;; If there is more than one, they won’t work right.

I removed all the related code, which fixed the postage stamp problem, but my fonts were uglified badly enough that emacs was nearly unusable. Changing mac-allow-anti-aliasing to t in init/view.el fixed that.

Then I found that css-mode was not working correctly. Your repo pulls in an old version that overrides the css-mode that comes with emacs, a bad thing.

Finally I ran into the ecb-commented-out thing. I tried uncommenting it and got errors, and since one of the main things I wanted was ecb, at that point I removed the link to your repo and went back to installing things one at a time (in ~/Library/Application Support/Aquamacs Emacs, which is aquamac’s preferred location.) I started with cedet again, then discovered that it was already bundled and could be activated with a few incantations in .emacs. After that, installing ecb worked and then I installed selected other things, either from your repo (including rinari!) or downloading them. So mostly I think I’ve got what I need— now I just need to figure out how to use them.

I am disappointed in ecb. I just started learning rails and programming my first app last week. I started out with emacs but found it overwhelming to deal with all those files in different directories, so I switched to Textmate so I could use the sidebar. It is a beautiful program visually and the sidebar is a terrific help– I was quite productive over the weekend even though I didn’t take the time to learn any of its features. (And as you mention, the indentation is horrible.) In the long run, however, it won’t do as I’m too hooked on emacs. I kept feeding Textmate emacs key sequences, some of which worked and some of which sent the program into conniption fits.

I thought ecb would be a good replacement for the textmate sidebar as I’d seen screenshots, but it doesn’t really seem to work like that. It’s ugly, and it brings up a ton of little windows with meaningless names like “W-0″ and “W-1″ and by default the mouse doesn’t work with it on the mac. Even after changing the mouse customization, the mouse doesn’t really work the way you’d expect, and I can’t find any good documentation on the program (If you have any suggestion in that regard I’d appreciate it). The docs on http://ecb.sourceforge.net/ go into long-winded discussions of trees and leaves without really telling you how to use the program.

Anyway, I hope my report of my experiences helps some readers, and thanks for your help. Even if plugging in your repo didn’t work, the information you have shared has been a great help.

PS: you want to ‘git submodule update –init’ on the base directory, and then switch to vendor/rinari and fire up ‘git submodule update –init’ again(the second one will take care of pulling jump.el etc).

This is actually not a problem with your git version. It usually happens when a repo re-writes history. As in, the repo owner decided to remove a commit or modify tree for an existing commit.
Changing public commits is acually a bad development practice, but in this case, since cedet repo is just a mirror, it has to track what happens upstream.

Anyway, I have archived and uploaded my local copy(it should expand to a directory named emacs, which you can then either symlink ~/.emacs.d -> or just rename to ~/.emacs.d).

Here is the link to archive: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16810295/my-emacs-repo.tar.bz2 (you can get the signature here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16810295/my-emacs-repo.tar.bz2.asc)

My public key is available as DA21772D on pgp.mit.edu.

I’ll update the submodule reference to the latest as soon as possible and that will fix it. Once thats done, i’ll post another comment here.

Thanks a ton for posting me the failure .

Cloning into vendor/cedet…
remote: Counting objects: 35019, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (11488/11488), done.
remote: Total 35019 (delta 24537), reused 33626 (delta 23365)
Receiving objects: 100% (35019/35019), 51.59 MiB | 38 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (24537/24537), done.
fatal: reference is not a tree: 88adf1ea01297803bb882b5c744ad967fdbd8d31
Unable to checkout ’88adf1ea01297803bb882b5c744ad967fdbd8d31′ in submodule path ‘vendor/cedet’

Tried updating my old git — didn’t help. I already installed a tarball of cedet yesterday while following the comments of http://codehunk.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/ruby-on-emacsjourney-from-textmate-to-emacs/ but I got stuck installing rinari. I downloaded the tarball but found you have to go download another tarball for jump.el and install it in another subdirectory and it still didn’t work. Sheesh!

I’m a 25 yr emacs veteran but installing new packages is never easy.

Anyway, is there a way I could use the cedet tarball with your stuff and avoid their repo problems?

Thank you for your help.