I am a heavy Vim user for over two decades now, but from time to time I want to give break to my hands and just browse code with mouse while doing reviews. This is where Vim is not good at, I’ve never felt in love with NERDTree plugin or these kind of stuff. Directory tree simply doesn’t look good in terminal. From all the modern editors like Textmate, Atom, VSCode and similar I like Sublime Text the most.

Being able to execute Ruby code or tests from Sublime Text is nice, it provides a regular expression parser to make backtrace “clickable”. It comes with definition for Ruby: https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/blob/master/Ruby/Ruby.sublime-build

{
  "shell_cmd": "ruby \"$file\"",
  "file_regex": "^(...*?):([0-9]*):?([0-9]*)",
  "selector": "source.ruby"
}

The thing is - it does not work in most cases.

There are multiple backtrace formatting in Ruby. In versions 1.8 - 2.4 the format is:

test.rb:7:in `partridges': Shouldn't this be recursive? (RuntimeError)
  from test.rb:3:in `turtle_doves'
  from test.rb:10:in `<main>'

Starting from Ruby 2.5 it’s reversed with index numbers:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  2: from test.rb:10:in `<main>'
  1: from test.rb:3:in `turtle_doves'
test.rb:7:in `partridges': Shouldn't this be recursive? (RuntimeError)

The regular expression in Sublime Text 3 (build from summer 2018) does only capture line 7 and completly ignores “from” lines. But there’s more, exceptions are often printed to console via backtrace call from Exception class from Ruby standard library. An example from our application:

E, [2017-01-16T12:15:59.678835 #32142] ERROR -- : undefined method `join' for #<String:0x007f1a587784a8> (NoMethodError)
/usr/share/sinatra-1.3.5/lib/sinatra/showexceptions.rb:37:in `rescue in call'
/usr/share/sinatra-1.3.5/lib/sinatra/showexceptions.rb:21:in `call'
/usr/share/sinatra-1.3.5/lib/sinatra/base.rb:124:in `call'
...

Testing frameworks does the same often prepending whitespace (tab usually) for each line:

NoMethodError: undefined method `render' for "test":String
    app/models/host/base.rb:351:in `render_template'
    /home/lzap/work/foreman_discovery/lock_templates.rb:14:in `block in lock_templates'
    /home/lzap/work/foreman_discovery/lock_templates.rb:10:in `each'
    /home/lzap/work/foreman_discovery/lock_templates.rb:10:in `lock_templates'

Sublime Text needs a regular expression which captures them all. I had to find how to do non-capturing group in Sublime regular parser and the rest was easy:

{
  "shell_cmd": "ruby \"$file\"",
  "file_regex": "^\\s*(?:\\d:)?\\s*(?:from )?([^:]+):(\\d+):in",
  "selector": "source.ruby"
}

I filed a PR in the Sublime Packages repo with the change: https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/pull/1706

That should do it. Have fun!