RubyFrontier, Mavericks, and TextMate 2

Some of my earlier thoughts here have described my adventures with different versions of Ruby, especially in connection with RubyFrontier. So it’s only right to mention that at this point I’m not playing around with Ruby versions at all. I’m working under Mac OS X 10.9 “Mavericks”, which effectively force-upgrades you to Ruby 2.0. So at the moment I’m not using rbenv: I’m just using the default system Ruby that Mavericks provides.

This combination (RubyFrontier and Ruby 2.0 on Mavericks) works fine with TextMate 2, which is currently open source and free. That is the combination I’m currently using for all my writing. (There was some trouble, under TextMate 2, with the AsciiDoc bundle that I’ve been using for years to write the several editions of my iOS programming book; but I solved that by creating my own AsciiDoc bundle.)

I should also mention that TextMate 2 is remarkably easy to build on your own, if downloading the prebuilt binary doesn’t satisfy your DIY urges. Just follow the simple directions. You will need Xcode and HomeBrew. Disregard the paragraph in the instructions that says you don’t need to install hg — you do. Also, beware of Xcode 5.1, which includes a new version of clang that breaks the build process; stick with Xcode 5.0.2.