I think it's handy to have a command like this, but I think we should make it toggle between the old and new styles. This makes it fit better with commands like Ruby → Toggle String / Symbol and Source → Toggle *.

If we do make that change, it looks the the toggle commands usually use a keyboard shortcut of ⌃ plus some meaningful character. ⌃: and ⌃{ are taken, so maybe we could use your = but with ⌃ for ⌃=.

Thoughts?

Right, I thought of htat but then I'd have to figure out how to write a regex to toggle back from the new syntax to the old!

The hashrocket syntax is pretty straightforward, but the new syntax is a lot harder to reliably match, since colons are in regular use. Take this hash, for example:

{book: "A Book Title: A book subtitle", sentence: "Some may say: try harder"}

Guess I'd just have to ignore colons within strings? I'd have to think about that for a bit.

Yeah. You could have TextMate pass you the scope delimited content, but I'm not sure that's even needed in this case. This gets us reasonably close, I think:

>> %q{{book: "A Book Title: A book subtitle", sentence: 'Some may \'say: try harder\'', number: 1_024, var: var, method: m(1, 2, 3)}}.gsub(/\G(\{|,\s*)(\w+):(\s*(?:"(?:\\"|[^"])*"|'(?:\\'|[^'])*'|\w+\([^)]*\)|[^,]+))/
=> "{:book => \"A Book Title: A book subtitle\", :sentence => 'Some may \\'say: try harder\\'', :number => 1_024, :var => var, :method => m(1, 2, 3)}"

Wow, that's impressive. I think you're missing some of the command? The second param to gsub is missing.

Sorry, I'm not sure how that got cut off:

gsub(/\G(\{|,\s*)(\w+):(\s*(?:"(?:\\"|[^"])*"|'(?:\\'|[^'])*'|\w+\([^)]*\)|[^,]+))/, "\\1:\\2 =>\\3")

Ok, thanks, that is amazing. Works great. I changed it to toggle and switched the shortcut to ^=

I had to tweak it a bit -- for the toggles it's nice to have it do the whole line, and hashes don't necessarily start with { either. I suppose there might be a case where it doesn't work, but for every case in my current project it worked great, including Selecting all and hitting ^=.