Autoindent is incomplete for Ruby

[verachell]

What is the bug?
I have the autoindent plugin installed but it does not work for Ruby files. However, php files indent just fine as expected.

plugin status shows that autoindent and quickcomment are installed, as expected. I also did plugin update to make sure plugins were up to date.

This is on ox 0.7.7 running on Raspberry Pi arm64 on Debian, installed from source.

What did you do to get the bug?
If I type in the ox editor into any file ending in .rb, there is no indenting happening at all. Everything is flush to the left hand margin.

What behaviour were you expecting?
I was expecting after def or { to get an indent on the next line

Screenshots (if applicable)

[verachell]

After inspecting the code, I have realized that the issue would be better defined as "Autoindent is incomplete for Ruby" and have therefore updated the title of this issue. Fortunately, the ox editor is designed to allow the user to modify the plugins without needing to recompile. So in this case I can modify my $HOME/.config/ox/autoindent.lua file to add in formatting rules for Ruby

I will later add code snippets in this issue thread once I have something that works for me. Then other Rubyists can add it into their local autoindent.lua file. Alternatively, the ox repo owner/maintainer can add the snippets into the source code for the plugin. I'm reluctant to submit a PR because I'm not a Lua programmer and this is literally my first foray into lua

I will update this issue later with code snippets, but I will be first trying out my code changes by using ox as my main working editor for Ruby. So I want to leave time to experience how it works, whether I have missed anything, etc.

IMPORTANT NOTE - the autoindent plugin as written in the repo does not account for the situation where an indent and dedent occur on the same line. As it currently stands, if both occur in 1 line, only the indent is applied. I've also changed that in my local copy, not sure if that would introduce other problems though.

[verachell]

Here is the code I have for Ruby for the autoindent plugin. It's not by any means complete, but it works and it is a move in the right direction for Rubyists. For reasons I will explain below I will not be continuing on with this work, but if anyone wants to they can just extend it from there.

Code snippets to include in $HOME/.config/ox/autoindent.lua for Ruby:

in functions section

-- add my functions
-- Determine if a line starts with a certain string, including the case where it is prefixed with whitespace
function autoindent:wstarts(y, query)
	local line = editor:get_line_at(y)
	return string.match(line, "^" .. query) or string.match(line, "^%s+" .. query)
end

function matchcount(matchdata)
	matchnum = 0
	for m in matchdata do
		matchnum = matchnum + 1
	end
	return matchnum
end

-- Determine the net count of open vs closed pair symbols in a line
-- opensym is the open version e.g. "{" and closesym is the closed e.g. "}"
-- A net count of 0 means there are an equal number of open vs closed
-- including the case where there are zero. A result > 0 means the balance
-- is in favor of open, while a result of < 0 means it is in favor of closed
-- This function does NOT discard symbols appearing in strings, but
-- that would be a good future improvement to go for
function autoindent:paircounter(y, opensym, closesym)
	local line = editor:get_line_at(y)
	left = string.gmatch(line, opensym)
	leftcount = matchcount(left)
	right = string.gmatch(line, closesym)
	rightcount = matchcount(right)
	return leftcount - rightcount
end
	
-- end my functions --

in indent section for Ruby

 -- begin my own additions
  		if self:wstarts(y, "def") then return true end
  		if self:wstarts(y, "class") then return true end
  		if self:wstarts(y, "module") then return true end
  		if self:wstarts(y, "if") then return true end
  		if self:wstarts(y, "while") then return true end
  		if self:paircounter(y, "%{", "%}") > 0 then return true end
  		if self:paircounter(y, "%(", "%)") > 0 then return true end
  		if self:paircounter(y, "%[", "%]") > 0 then return true end
        -- end my own additions

in dedent section for Ruby

-- begin my own additions
	  	if self:paircounter(y, "%{", "%}") < 0 then return true end
  		if self:paircounter(y, "%(", "%)") < 0 then return true end
  		if self:paircounter(y, "%[", "%]") < 0 then return true end
	-- end my own additions

Comments and points to note

• If someone wants to turn it into a PR, please go ahead and do so. This is literally my first piece of lua code so I therefore do not want to make a PR myself
• The autoindent plugin in general does not account for the situation where an indent and dedent occur on the same line. If both occur in 1 line, only the indent is applied. This could be an issue for Ruby and for other languages where it is possible that an indent and dedent could occur on the same line. I have not attempted to change that behavior but it is something that would make an improvment
• I will not be working further on this, simply because for reasons outside of autoindent it is proving difficult to use the ox editor on Linux - but kudos to devs for making it work AND easy to install on the Raspberry Pi 5! I love that. There are very few auto-indenting editors that work for the arm64 Linux ecosystem and it is lovely to see ox entering this milieu. The major sticking point for me is the inability to copy and paste within the editor in Linux. ctrl-v or ctrl-shift-v do not work for pasting. There does not seem to be an obvious or intuitive way to copy and paste, although it is possible I have missed something. This issue is likely to also affect Linux x86 as well, although I have not tried it with x86, but they have the same terminal setup.

Not completely related to this issue, there are some documentation improvements which could be made to ox:

Smaller keyboards do not have a home and end button (mapped in ox for going to the beginning or end of a line) these automatically substitute in most systems for fn-left-arrow and fn-right-arrow and I found these work fine on my keyboard with ox. Therefore, documentation could be improved by saying

home or fn-left-arrow to go to the beginning of the line
end or fn-right-arrow to go to the end of a line

Also, you can select an entire line with 2 left clicks (or a left-click-drag to select) followed by a right click, but this appears to be not obvious or not documented. If this is indeed a feature of ox (and not of my OS or terminal) it should be added into the documentation