Introducing SketchMate: a RubyMine integration with REPL

Developers Ruby API
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Hi everyone,

I’m a lazy developer currently drawing my house in SketchUp. And to scratch my own itch I started hacking on better REPL experience for SketchUp. Have a working proof of concept and looking for feedback:

Asking why better REPL than existing Ruby Developer Console? Well, REPL is not about typing commands into a shell. The magic happens when you are finally able to use power of your favorite code editor with persistent scripts and send code snippets from there to be evaluated in the REPL while working with live system like SketchUp. It is hard to explain. You have to experience this workflow to fully understand. It is not that common in Ruby world but I come from Clojure/LISP land which is very REPL-driven. Oh, and ChatGPT also gets it, it briefly evaluated SketchMate and replied:

You can automate repetitive tasks and expand SketchUp’s capabilities with custom workflows and scripting, making your design process more efficient than ever.

Intrigued? https://github.com/binaryage/sketchmate/tree/main/examples/02-poor-mans-parametric-cad

2 Likes
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Hi!

The project looks super interesting, I was looking for a way to cut down on time when creating an extension. Right now I am just copy and pasting the function into Ruby Console.
I am very new to developing on Ruby, so I cannot really figure out how to set it up so that it would work with RubyMine. So any help would be good (Mainly, what do I do with the launcher script?)

Thanks a lot!

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Hi, I’m sorry I cannot really help individual users with general setup. I tried to document it in the github repo. But if you had a specific questions, maybe I could try to answer them here in this thread.