RbNav

RbNav is a lightweight Vim plugin that helps you navigate the classes, modules, and methods in your Ruby project

[screenshots]

Benefits:

• navigate the classes and modules in your Ruby projects with less typing
• jump to methods on current page more quickly
• symbol-centric approach to navigation might suit you better than the file-centric approach

Please check out my related Vim plugin ri.vim for Ruby documentation-browsing features.

Prerequisites

• Ruby 1.9 or higher (tested on 1.9.2)
• Vim 7.2 or higher
• GNU grep 2.6.3 or higher (check your version with grep -V)

Install

gem install rb_nav && rb_nav_install

This installs the rb_nav.vim plugin into your ~/.vim/plugin directory.

To upgrade RbNav to a newer version, just repeat the installation procedure.

Commands

For the all the commands below, the mapleader is assumed to be ,. If it is \ or something else for your setup, use that instead.

Invoking the plugin

• ,n navigate the classes and modules in your project
• ,,n navigate the methods in the current file

To change these keymappings, edit the two lines at the end of ~/.vim/plugin/rb_nav.vim.

• CTRL-p and CTRL-n let you navigate the drop-down matches
• <ENTER> selects an item
• CTRL-e closes the match list and lets you continue typing
• CTRL-u: when the match list is active, cycles forward through the match list and what you've typed so far; when the match list is inactive, erases what you've typed.
• both TAB and CTRL-x CTRL-u reactivates autocompletion if it's gone away
• CTRL-y selects the highlighted match without triggering ENTER

Autocompletion is case-insensitive.

You can also match a fragment. So if you want to get to UsersController, you can type usersc and hit ENTER. This should be sufficient to bring up UsersController as long as that is the top match for the fragment usersc.

The search path

By default RbNav searches files using these grep command flags:

let g:RbNavPaths = " . --exclude-dir='\.git' --exclude-dir='vendor'  \
--exclude-dir='db' --include='*.rb' "

You can override these flags by reassigning g:RbNavPaths to something else in a .vimrc files in your project's root directory.

Bug reports and feature requests

Please submit them here:

• https://github.com/danchoi/rb_nav/issues

About the developer

My name is Daniel Choi. I specialize in Ruby, Rails, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and iOS development. I am based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

• Twitter: @danchoi
• Personal Email: dhchoi@gmail.com
• My Homepage: http://danielchoi.com/software